The Internet in the Everyday Lifeworld: ‘I-and-the-Internet’ Narratives from Members of China’s ‘Net-Generation’

Drawing on Schutz’s (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973) notion of the everyday lifeworlds, this fi rst empirical chapter explores how Chinese urban youth actively appropriate the Internet in ways that fi t into their social-biographical situations and relevance structures. My exploration here draws upon the 70 semi-structured interviews with urban youth (aged 15-28) in a mediumsized city in North China during my fi eldtrips in 2007 and 2008 (see the methodological note in the Introduction).