How do people approach ICTS?

Gillian: I was really surprised by how positive people were about ICTs of all kinds. Apart from the really common idea that ICT use would affect younger peoples' educational attainment, almost no one expressed any negative feelings at all. These fears that we have in the West about ICTs undermining established forms of social practice, of being less desirable modes of communication, weren't really reflected in the way people in the town tended to talk about and approach ICT use.

I think this is part of the overall approach to development and progress in China. When I talked about this project with people in the town, the biggest thing that they wanted to communicate to others was that their lives were so much better than 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and that they were really positive and proud about the new developments and ICTs are a really important part of these new developments and are being approached in a similar way.

Tom: So, yeah, I mean I think my own findings really do concur with that. Overall, these are new things and we do have to remember that these are new technologies coming into people's lives and when that happens they are bound to cause a certain degree of friction and change and tension but the fact is that overall, you know, these things have just been so happily adopted by people and that within, kind of, a few years of coming into people's lives they are so much part of people's lives now that they can't imagine surviving without them and that in itself, I think, is a testament to, kind of, the popularity of these kind of platforms.

And of course, kind of, then we need to rethink the idea that ICTs might be necessarily good or bad things and I think this kind of discourse comes from a technologically deterministic framework that assumes that technology just acts on people and dictates how people act and that people themselves don't have any agency whatsoever over these things and I think it's really important to balance these ideas about how the material world acts on people with actually what we've seen, which is people using these technologies creatively in their own lives and for the kind of the social reasons and the social things that they think are useful to them.

Gillian: But I think the discourse of whether technology is good or bad in a technologically determinist sense is a bit different from what we are asking here, which is what people think about the technology and whether in their lived experience it has been good or bad. People obviously have different ideas about the good and bad of technology and to ask this doesn't deny them agency, it gives them voice.

Tom: Yes, people do have different ideas about the good and bad and people are overwhelmingly positive, in general, about ICTs. But it bears mentioning that they are actually positive about most things in their life, I think, and the other thing I'd argue as well is that you can't just concentrate on attitudes toward ICTs and we have to realize that they are using ICTs as part of social relationships so attitudes to them are embedded within these relationships themselves, I think.

Gillian: That's a great point and I'm glad you made it because looking at how ICT use is embedded in social relationships in the second question that we are going to address in this project.