ABSTRACT

Introduction Great claims have been made in both media and academic scholarship about the capacity of the Internet to alter the ways in which people engage with others. Manuel Castells, meanwhile, has famously claimed that ‘the major transformation of sociability in complex societies took place with the substitution of networks for spatial communities as major forms of sociability’ (2001: 127). Such alterations have been accredited with having profound impacts on subjectivities. As Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold note, new technologies and patterns of communication have not only provided new boundaries and opportunities for self but also ‘new routes through which the self can be established’ (2003: 74). Whilst acknowledging the extent to which the Internet facilitates new forms of communication in cyberspace, this chapter situates young Chinese informants’ usage and attitudes towards the Internet within a distinctly offline context, believing, like Liu Fengshu, that the Internet not only needs to be understood within its specific socio-cultural context but also that people’s interactions with the Internet are interrelated with everyday life activities and routines (2010: 3). I argue that in order to fully understand young Chinese Internet practices, they must be considered within not only the wider context of their offline lives but also within the social discourses which frame these activities. Specifically, I first focus on informants’ usage of the Internet before proceeding to discuss how young Chinese informants simultaneously held positive and negative attitudes towards the Internet. I argue that such polarized views are a consequence of the ways in which the Internet has been constructed in wider social discourses. Then, I focus on the ways that informants used homepages, highlighting how performances of subjectivities are slightly altered from those expressed offline. Nonetheless, like Liu Fengshu (2010: 3), I hope to show that users’ offline and online lives are very much intertwined.