A Study Of Rural Women’s Smartphone Use From The Perspective Of New Media Empowerment

With the significant increase of Internet penetration in rural areas,the number of farmers using smartphones is increasing.According to the 49 th Statistical Report on the Development of Internet in China,the number of rural Internet users in China has reached 284 million.Rural women’s smartphone use and new media empowerment are often neglected due to both their geographical and gender disadvantages.Based on the research on new media empowerment,this paper conducted a field survey in Linli County,Hunan Province.400 questionnaires were distributed and 10 rural women were selected for interviews to explore the smartphone use of rural women in the perspective of new media empowerment.There are seven sections in this paper.In the introduction,the research on empowerment and smartphone use is reviewed,and the background,methodology,significance and innovation of the research are introduced.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the study site and the research subjects,providing a macro background for the later analysis.Chapter 2 introduces the smartphone usage duration,usage purpose and usage preference of rural women.Chapter 3 analyzes the characteristics of rural women’s smartphone use in terms of information empowerment,expression empowerment and action empowerment by combining the questionnaire results and interviews.Chapter 4 analyzes the problems that rural women have in using smartphones,such as single access to information and difficulty in expressing their personal will,and analyzes the causes of the problems from the perspective of reality,including the lack of self-empowerment awareness and the lack of social power.Based on the previous analysis,Chapter 5 proposes suggestions to improve rural women’s new media empowerment from the levels of cognition,ability and action,which include changing ideology at the level of cognition,creating conditions for development at the level of ability,and leveraging organizations and platforms at the level of action.The concluding remarks summarize the study as a whole,analyzing the empowering effects of rural women’s smartphone use in terms of information,expression,and action,and providing an outlook on future research directions.The use of smartphones and new media empowerment of rural women is one of the important elements of the new rural construction.This paper focuses on the reality of smartphones empowering rural women in three dimensions: information,expression and action,and proposes corresponding suggestions for the existing problems.In addition to the results of the questionnaire survey,some interviews are also used in this paper.Although it is not representative of the overall sample of rural women,the power of new media empowerment can be felt from the words of rural women.