Places and Community
Jack Linchuan Qiu · The MIT Press eBooks · 2009
This chapter presents an overview on the making of working-class communities where the information have-less and working-class information and communication technologies (ICTs) are most concentrated, specifically the concrete urban places where the information have-less live and work. It considers the urban village (chengzhongcun) and the factories. The chapter analyzes the commercial informational services in Shipai Village based on data collected from April to December 2007, and shows that the booming IT sector in Shipai Village positively affected the indigenous population. It also reveals that the cases of Foxconn and Uniden exhibit the possibility of change in Chinese factories. Workers in factory dormitories are now much less separated from urban society and much less atomized with the spread of working-class ICTs.