"Sleeping in Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users." A talk by Tricia Wang (www.triciawang.com), a sociologist, technology researcher, and ethnographer. First delivered at SXSW in March 2011.

1. The Next 300 Million Chinese Users
SXSW | Austin, Texas | March 12, 2011 | triciawang.com #300MM @triciawang
First, since this is a future15 talk and I can’t answer questions I would love for you to post your feedback such as things you like or things that aren’t clear using
the hash-tag #300MM
Who here has been to an internet cafe in China?

2. ?
who has been to an internet cafe in China?
#300MM
@triciawang

3. #300MM
@triciawang
photo credit: chinasmack.com
These cafes are filled up with hundreds of internet users who cannot afford their own PC or internet connection. The majority of internet cafe users are poor,
mostly migrants form the rural countryside. When you’re inside a cafe, it just looks like hundreds of people playing games, watching porn and sleeping overnight at
the cafe!

4. “ Use the internet in a civilized way.
”
Stay away from internet cafe
Stay away from Internet addiction, start from yourself.
#300MM
@triciawang
photo credit: xinhua
In this picture, a policeman is making a speech to kids about the dangers of internet use, underscored by the message in the red ribbon.
The media portrays internet use at these cafes as a psychological addiction, as places where uneducated and classless migrants hang out causing youth to stop
going to school, commit crimes, have more sex, and do bad stuff life playing games. So with all these poor migrants hanging out in cafes, a lot of middle-class and
elite people are panicking.

5. The Sky Net Team
we monitor
• IM chats
• text messages
• forums
• emails
The government has stepped in by requiring all internet cafes to operate with a permit. Theyʼve also invested a lot of money and time into the SkyNet team -the
largest paid and volunteer based cyber police that monitors online interaction such as IM chats, text messages, forums, and emails.

6. Citizens, like these elderly women, are encouraged to volunteer their time at internet cafes urging youth to go home.

7. Whatʼs all this panic over
games and porn? #300MM
@triciawang
photo credit: imagine china
But whatʼs up with all this panic just over porn and games? Well thereʼs a lot more going on here than it seems.

8. (thereʼs a lot more going on here than it seems)
#300MM
@triciawang

9. For outsiders, what you see here is
what most middle-class and elite
Chinese citizens also see - a bunch
of poor migrants watching games
and playing porn.
#300MM
@triciawang
For outsiders, what you see here is what most middle-class and elite Chinese citizens also see - a bunch of poor migrants playing games and watching porn.
Essentially, they are doing nothing worthwhile.
However, Internet cafes are one of the cheapest ways for poor people such as migrants to get online. They can use it for 8 hours a day for less than $2.00. And
anyone can use it - they donʼt turn people away.

10. whatʼs really going on inside:
talk to friends find jobs relax
stay in touch with family
cheap child-care use bathrooms
affordable shelter #300MM
@triciawang
Migrants are accessing information about work and news, they use them to stay in touch with friends and family.
Without a stable home in the city, internet cafes are often the closest thing a migrant has to a “home.” And many of them have figured out that itʼs cheaper to just
stay over night at a cafe than to pay for a room. Cafes are responding to users by constructing cubicles where you can lean against a wall for those who want to
sleepover or have a little more privacy.
In addition to providing access to information and shelter, you can also buy also food and water, and use a bathroom. The bathroom at the internet cafe is often the
only bathroom hooked up to the sewage system in a slum.
This is also a place of safety. For example, I see migrants using cafes as affordable child-sitting. Parents can leave their children here, go to work for 15 hours and
come back to find their child in the same place. Parents would tell me that they were happy that their child as the cafe all day and not on the streets with a gang.

11. internet cafes are places of
safety stability comfort
#300MM
@triciawang
So counter to what the government and the media argue - that internet cafes are places of moral corruption - my observations revealed that cafes are places of
safety, stability, and comfort for migrants living in city that seemed at times hostile to them.

12. internet cafes are
important sites of social interaction
#300MM
@triciawang
I make the case that internet cafes are serious sites of social interaction for rural-urban migrants in China.
Itʼs totally new - migrants accessing networked digital technologies, coordinating with each other online, and creating new communities. For the first time ever,
non-elite users have access to the same technologies as elite users.
But while some of these processes may be new (as itʼs not typical to associate migrants and intensive technology use), this is actually an old story

13. new processes!!!!
migrants building new urbanization
using forms of through
technology! community! digital tools!
#300MM
@triciawang
While some of these processes may be new (as itʼs not typical to associate migrants and intensive technology use), this is actually an old story - poor people
coming into cities and trying to make it their home, middle-class and elite people start panicking, and government officials stepping in.

14. but itʼs an old story
poor people government
elites panic
come to cities steps in
#300MM
@triciawang
While some of these processes may be new (as itʼs not typical to associate migrants and intensive technology use), this is actually an old story - poor people
coming into cities and trying to make it their home, middle-class and elite people start panicking, and government officials stepping in.

15. 21st century - Chinese rural 20th century - Irish & Italian
to urban migrants immigrants
When poor immigrants from Italy and Ireland came to the US around the turn of the 20th century, they too, like todayʼs Chinese rural to urban migrants, were
trying to make the city their home.

16. saloons - leisure hang out spaces for immigrants
Regardless of how much money you have, everyone needs a place to hang out. And back then poor immigrants were hanging out in saloons.

17. Middle-class and elite Americans panicked. Anti-saloonists were decrying saloons as as a site of moral corruption, sexual debauchery, sexual child abuse, and
violence. This sounds familiar right?

18. anti-alcohol propoganda posters
So these are some posters from early 1900ʼs - in the same way that the Chinese Skynet cartoons encourages citizens to report suspicious online activity, these
anti-saloon propoganda encouraged people to support Prohibition. Anti-Saloonists believed that the banning of alcohol would teach immigrants how to spend time
inside their homes - which were really slums - and how to become “civilized Americans.”

19. Anti-Saloon Movement
lead to Prohibition
The anti-saloon movement succeeded with the passing of Prohibition in 1919. But we all know how that story turned out.

20. sociologists sent into
saloons to find out why
immigrants spent so much
time in them
they found out that saloons
were important places for
immigrants to relax,
socialize, use the bathroom
#300MM
@triciawang
However what came out of the Anti-Saloon movement were urban sociologists and social workers who wanted to find out what was really going on inside the
saloons. They discovered that immigrants went to saloons to stay in touch with people from their own village. In the process they made new friends from other
villages and/or ethnic groups. People shared tips about new jobs, housing, and survival in an entirely new country. This was also a place where people could relax.
Families would go to saloons because -- just like internet cafes in China -- it was often the only place with a bathroom connected to the sewage. When anti-
saloonists saw images of children coming in and out of saloons, they assumed children were being sexually abused and, unlike the sociologists, didnʼt take the
time to find out what was really going on there.

21. privately owned spaces of communication
technology access are the new third places
actively reprogramming urban space
(internet cafe)
#300MM
@triciawang
One of these urban sociologists, Ray Oldenberg argued that places like saloons were absolutely vital for creating a healthy, diverse, and open city. He called these
types of spaces, “third places,” places that are neither home or work, such as pubs, cafes, libraries, and public spaces.
immigrant and poor communities, just as much as middle-class and elite communities, need third places because these are important sites of community
formation.
In China, I make the case that privately owned spaces of information access - internet cafes - are the new third places for non-elite citizens.
And so what often looks like an empty street is actually the home of intense socializing. It just isnʼt obvious to someone who isnʼt part of the activity. The same goes
for a super busy cafe with everyone hooked up to the computer. These are the places were migrants are actively reprogramming urban space to work for
them.

22. building the new
publicly virtual community “street corner”
blurring blurring re-mixing
private/public kinship ties digital/material
This is where people are being publicly virtual. Because many of them donʼt have a stable home, much less a private room, they are doing a lot of things that we
would see as “private” in public places. So we have to understand the norms for how people are consuming content in public settings.
But more importantly, these are spaces for community building. Migrants are able to create new forms of associations that stand outside of the family, blurring
kinship ties. This means that we have to get to understand how peopleʼs social networks are changing and how this affects the types of leisure entertainment they
consume.
Essentially, these cafes are becoming the new digital street corner where digital and material interactions are being re-mixed.

23. my field work site
•living with migrants
•going to schools
•hanging out in internet cafes #300MM
•working in factories @triciawang
So what I do is hang out in a lot of third places. Iʼm a sociologist and ethnographer. For the last fours years, Iʼve been studying how migrantsʼ interaction with
digital technologies in Mexico and China create new spaces for community. I work where they work. I sleep where they sleep. I live with them.

24. what the future of the
internet will look like?
how will the next 3 billion users
experience everyday digital life? #300MM
@triciawang
For my research in China, I want to answer two questions. 1.) What the future of the internet will look like.

25. what can we learn from 300 million
rural-urban migrants?
#300MM
@triciawang
2.) What we learn from 300 million rural-urban migrants.

26. Where are potential areas for social change?
#300MM
@triciawang
So if places like internet cafes and other sites of information access point to this emerging third places for migrants, what does this tell us about potential areas for
social change?
What are the consequences when an entire stratum of society realizes improved connections through ICTs to many others stratums that were once impossible to
reach?
Well there are some important shifts that are happening that have radical implications for how games, entertainment, and products will be consumed. I’m just
going to highlight of few spaces processes today.

27. 1
change from the bottom up will take form in
disruptive citizenship
this happens when people on the margins experience the
limits of consumer citizenship
#300MM
@triciawang
Migrants are becoming urbanized through a culture of consumption that is mediated and intensified through digital tools. They may be able to buy whatever
they can afford, but without city residency cards, rural-urban migrants are still technically illegal citizens in their new urban homes. A migrant with limited
residency does not have access to full social benefits such as health and education.
Much like how MExican immigrants are treated in the US, the economy depends on their labor but the state will deny their full personhood.
This situation cannot hold as they will make demands that will match their increasingly consumeristic lifestyle preferences.
Migrants will be using ICTs to engage in disruptive forms of citizenship when (and if) they realize limits of consumer citizenship.
To be clear, this does not mean political changes. Disruptive social changes are often beneficial changes for society at large.

28. 2 Leisure activities become even more intense
sites of social interaction because they are
politically benign
#300MM
@triciawang
With a strong authoritarian government that does not sanction political organizing, leisure sites such as games, movies, music, and consumption, become more
intense sites of social interaction precisely because they are politically benign. But everything, even games, becomes politicized.

29. 3
Leisure activities becomes important areas of
cultural control
"Even if dominant institutions are not directly overthrown by new technologies,
fundamental aspects of culture are transformed by them." Mark Poster
#300MM
@triciawang
The government is aware of this, so they are increasingly treating benign leisure activities as a site of cultural control.
But this cultural activities and symbols can never be fully controlled because there is no one center of control - culture survives precisely because its form is
distributed.
Observing cultural tensions around digital technologies reveals so much about existing power structures because cultural changes can happen before major social
changes happen, as information theorist Mark Poster argues.
"Even if dominant institutions are not directly overthrown by new technologies, fundamental aspects of culture are transformed by them." (Information Please,
Mark Poster 2006:192)
There's a lot of great research that's being done on how cultural control is exerted from top-down, but I'm much more interested in how people are reacting to,
pushing back, accepting or questioning culture.

30. 4
restrictions
+
=
unique set of conditions
free for all for innovation!
+ Restrictions are often seen as
dreamers unique challenges
#300MM
@triciawang
One of the major cultural changes is that there is a unique set of conditions for innovations unfolding.
China has 3 important factor that make it an innovative environment: a unique set of restrictions, areas that are highly unregulated (such as IP), and millions of
highly motivated individuals who have high hopes for their futures.
What appears as restrictions to us are often seen as a a unique set of challenges to overcome. But the point is that millions of migrants want to pick up
programming skills and are quickly being trained in these skills. There is so much human capital to be unleashed in China. And that energy is being funneled
through online spaces.
That bottom up push back is actually a vital component of a innovative environment.
This poster here is an advertisement for a hacking college geared towards people who don’t have a chance at getting a formal education to pick programming
skills. THe iconography of Keanu Reeves as Neo from The Matrix is not lost upon the migrants. The abundance of these kind of colleges reflect how migrants are
trying to reinvent their lives through opportunities found on the informal market. WIth all these migrants learning programming languages, they are unleashing a lot
of human capital.

31. China is a humongous living experiment
#300MM
@triciawang
This is all to say that China is a humongous living experiment. Cities are being torn up and rebuilt to accommodate low-resource populations and high-tech
infrastructures.

32. disposable urban household income in
China has to keep growing to
maintain economic growth
Text
#300MM
@triciawang
In order for China to sustain its urban growth and its entire population, it has to bring these millions of migrants flowing into cities into the middle class and ensure
that the urban household income keeps growing.
*It has to maintain economic growth (annual growth rate 7% for 12th Five-Year Plan 2011-2015).

33. In order for China to sustain its urban
growth and its entire population, it has
to bring these millions of migrants
flowing into cities into the middle class
#300MM
@triciawang

34. digitally networking the consumption
desires of millions of people
#300MM
@triciawang
Essentially, to accomplish this, China is digitally networking the consumption desire of millions of migrants who are aspiring to live the lifestyle of the middle-class.
People are using cellphones and internet cafes to create the middle-class/elite identity they desire. They do this through the content that they consume, the
games that they play, the clothes that they buy, and down to the choices they make in their online identities.

35. Digital Urbanism
on the margins
millions of rural-urban migrants
are becoming urbanized through
#300MM
low-cost digital tools @triciawang
This is a process that I call digital urbanism on the margins where million of rural-urban migrants are becoming urbanized through low-cost digital tools. These
migrants are a major force of contemporary urbanization. Together, digitization + migration + urbanization, are changing our world because these processes alone
facilitate dreams, the creation of desires, and emergence of new practices.

36. workings of digital urbanism
tech & protocol product practice people
economic (code/networks/
(hardware, (subjectivity,
policy standards)
content) (communication, identity)
(legislation) spatial)
rural-urban belonging
migration Hardware: low-
cost tech tools non co-present
communication
digitization of dreams
widespread
information infrastructure
organization
software: workflow desires
social media/
gaming
state managed
growth community
blurring
open web
private/public
standards and changing
programming kinship ties
languages re-mix
internet filtering digital/material
regime #300MM
work @triciawang
In my research, I account for several processes that contribute to Digital Urbanism from tech policy to protocols. But whatʼs really at the core of my work and also
what I really want to emphasize today are the hopes and dreams of the people living on the margins. Because it is these hopes and dreams that are driving the
Chinese economy, US economy, and global economy. It is these dreams that are informing the kind of leisure activities people decide to engage in from games to
music and shopping.

37. world population: add 3 billion in 30 years
it took 10,000 years
to reach 3 billion
2011: 6.7 billion
more evenly developed
less evenly developed
Getting some insight into these 300 million users is only the beginning. There are millions of new non-elite users getting online outside of the US. Weʼre going to
be adding another 3 billion people to our planet in the next 30 years and the overwhelming majority of these people will be located outside the US. Just for some
context, it took 10,000 years for the human population to reach 3 billion.

38. can the planet support the millions of migrants who
have dreams to join the Chinese middle-class?
#300MM
@triciawang
photo credit: edward burtynsky
But the question really is, can the planet support the millions of migrants who have dreams to join the Chinese middle class?

39. Will cheap digital tools
be the game changer?
#300MM
@triciawang
And are cheap digital tools going to be the game changer? I believe that answering these questions requires us to look at third places - physical places where poor
people are using networked digital communication tools to mediate and create their dreams - these are the spaces to watch because these are the places where
people are actively reprogramming urban space to work for them.
Itʼs important to grasp these changes from the bottom up and from these peopleʼs perspective (as opposed to from our own position) because if we want to work
with, market to, collaborate with, and build with China, much less any part of the world- we have to genuinely want to understand of how the largest group of tech
users are making sense of the world. We absolutely have to.

40. Iʼll have some
observations to report
in 2012!
(if the world doesnʼt end)
#300MM
@triciawang
Thank you for allowing me to engage you in the ethnographic imagination. It is my belief that a deeper understanding of the present can give us a very grounded
vision for the future.
Iʼm moving to China for my fieldwork, this is my last stop in the US so I'll have some more observations of Chinese people sleeping in internet cafes to report in
2012!

41. .com
triciawang.com @triciawang
In the meantime I'll be blogging daily observations on BytesofChina.com and analysis on culture and technology on CulturaByt.es

42. thank you
to friends who listened and gave me advice: kristen taylor, kevin
slavin, kenyatta cheese, morgan ames. And thank you SXSW
community for all the feedback after my talk!
thank you to friends who listened and gave me advice: kristen taylor, kevin slavin, kenyatta cheese, morgan ames. And thank you SXSW community for all the
feedback after my talk!