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Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China

Online ISBN:
9780262255073
Print ISBN:
9780262170062
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Book

Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China

Published online:
22 August 2013
Published in print:
30 January 2009
Online ISBN:
9780262255073
Print ISBN:
9780262170062
Publisher:
The MIT Press

Abstract

The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. This book describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. It argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of “network labor” crucial to China’s economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, the author writes, are the information “have-less”: migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafés, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond. The author brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, he examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, the author writes, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.

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