ABSTRACT
The cultural weight of the subaltern While almost all of the movies analyzed so far are expressions of a technologically literate urbanite culture, this chapter looks at how smaller screens have impacted on people living at the margins of the technologically literate urbanite cultures, in communities, within and outside cities, that are on the other side of the technological divide because of economic and educational restrictions. Online video production and access presuppose minimum levels of income and technological skills that are mostly out of reach, although by no means totally alien, in the lives of lower income people.1 Of course, income and level of education are only two of many elements that contribute to the technological divide, which cuts across numerous other variables and needs to be contextualized not only historically and geographically but also in terms of age and gender. For my specific line of analysis, the crucial point about the digital divide is that it is not just a straightforward separation between users and non-users. Access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can occur at different levels and with very diverse degrees of agency. However, no matter how porous and multifaceted, a digital divide does exist in China. The digital barrier that separates middle-class educated urbanites from rural and rural-to-urban migrants and from the barely literate poor cannot be understated, especially at a time when there is great emphasis on the booming Chinese Internet usage.
