How does ICT use fit into social practice?

ICTs are used to fill up downtime: If there is a spare moment while sitting in the office or around the dinner table, people often reach for their phones to fill the silence. "It's so boring," said the hairdresser in the foreground of this picture as he reached for his phone. One person reaching for their phone tends to cause a chain reaction in which others reach for their phones as well. Smart phone ownership is very high among town residents, as with other areas of rural China, so many people have a multimedia experience embedded in their pockets.

However, smart phone ownership and the accompanying type of social interaction it affords appears somewhat gendered with married women much less likely to own a smart phone than their husbands. One woman explained that she did not have time to learn how to use a smart phone because she was too busy looking after her daughter and engaging in household tasks. ICTs are generally seen as opening up opportunities for their owners and these gendered usage practices may be embedded in the hierarchies of family life, with a woman often withdrawing from social media after the birth of her first child.

Apart from in relation to student's use of cell phones, individuals do not express concern about the frequency of cell phone usage or a sense that the use of cell phones to fill up downtime might be changing existing social practices, rather the stance on these issues is part of the discourse of development and progress in which new forms of communication and connection are replacing old within existing patterns of social connection. Noting that he thinks that computers are replacing the practice of reading books, making calls replacing writing letters and messaging services replacing dropping round to call on others, one local business owner emphasized that he did not think these changes were bad, just part of the process of the new replacing the old.