Studying the Sent-Down Internet: roundtable on research methods

WB: Rural people make sense of things in their own contexts, which researchers from urban areas usually do not understand in the first place. Back in 2002, when I was doing fieldwork in Renshou County, Sichuan Province, I was shocked to see the local cable TV channel “broadcast” online news. They cut and pasted pure text from Internet news sites such as Sina, and then showed it on a special channel 24 hours a day. Information from Sina thus entered the contexts of ordinary rural families, now all equipped with TV sets. This was something urban people wouldn’t understand without being in the field. A second challenge is, who sets the standard? Researchers often bring a rigid set of standards from cities, from their own experiences, about what’s “advanced technology” and what’s “backward.” They apply these standards with little respect for rural experiences, become judgmental, and miss important things. Rural people may also fabricate answers to please the researchers, telling them that they go online often when it is not true. A third challenge is gender sensitivity. The tremendous gender inequality that characterizes rural areas (in addition to other forms of inequality) is also beyond imagining for inexperienced urban researchers. All of these challenges boil down to one point: how can we recognize, in a way that remains true to its (rural) context, new modes of what I call “media convergence from below”?