Scope and limitations of the research

7.3 Scope and limitations of the research

The second limitation of the research is a result of its data collecting methods. The in-depth interview and the focus group were used as the major techniques to collect data. The study bases its analysis and conclusions on the self-reports of the participants. When drawing conclusions, the author must be cautious not to assume that what the participants reported is what they really did and thought, but what they tried to construct with the researcher and the group members. They reported and emphasised what they thought interesting, important, significant or worth sharing with the researcher or other group members. For example, the use of email was not mentioned by most participants. Actually only two participants mentioned the use of email without any detail. The fact is that email was ranked ninth in the top ten most popular Internet applications among Chinese users, according to CNNIC’s The 30th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.

The research takes a grounded theory approach. The interviews and the focus group were led by the participants instead of by the researcher or any pre-assumed questions. Such an approach generated rich and original data. In total forty-one categories are clearly defined with 3,408 references generated. However, the data collected are not evenly distributed under each category which emerged from the coding or among the participants. The participants tended to talk much more about some topics (eg. QQ in Chapter 4, 4.4.1; Weibo in Chapter 4, 4.4.3; & Belief in the Internet’s effect) than some other topics (eg. Online lecture in Chapter 4, 4.3.3; & government corruption in Chapter 5, 5.6). Not every participant contributed to each topic evenly. As a result, some categories are supported by more data and contribute more to understanding the studied topic while other topics might need further research.

Moreover, the research topic involves some politically sensitive content and private content that some participants might not have wanted to share with the interviewer or the group members. For example, when P07 talked about her sole experience of climbing over the Great Wall, she mentioned that she had viewed a blocked webpage and had been shocked by the information, which was completely different from what she had learned without climbing over the Great Wall. However, she insisted that she could not recall what the webpage and the content was. P10 reported that he had watched political satire online. He said that the content was somewhat against the Party or somewhat coloured by Western culture without actually saying what the content was when asked about it. P12 also reported that his roommate and he sometimes viewed politically sensitive content on Renren (a Chinese counterpart of Facebook), but he did not say anything about the content they viewed.

Finally the research concentrates on the Internet use of the participants and it is beyond the scope of the research to explore other factors about the participants’ lives, including their use of other media. Since other factors have not been studied, the research should be cautious of attributing the participants’ understandings to the influence of Internet use.

7.4 Contributions of the research

Another way to measure Internet use is by recorded hours online. This method was employed when Kraut, et al. (1998) tried to establish a causal direction of the relationship between Internet use and social involvement and psychological well-being in their longitudinal study. Nie and Erbring (2000) also oversimplified the Internet and its users, overlooking different Internet experiences and types of users. Those studies partially revealed some aspects of Internet use.

Dutta-Bergman (2005) asserted that ‘different media use patterns serve different functions for the individual consumer’. Individual users tend to use the Internet differently. The result of the June 1995 survey containing 997 online users conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press revealed that there were typically four basic types of users: the researchers who spent much time online doing research for work or school and research-related communication; the home consumers typically using the Internet for practical tasks like finding out information about travel, stock quotes and so on; the political expressives; and the party-animals going online for games and entertainment information (Norris and Jones, 1998). Shah, et al. (2001) broke down Internet use into four components – social recreation, product consumption, financial management, and information exchange – and indicated that ‘unlike overall Internet use, specific types of Internet usage have significant and systematic links with the production of social capital’. They pointed out that ‘informational uses of the Internet are positively associated with the production of social capital, while social capital is depleted by entertainment uses of the Internet’. Dutta-Bergman (2005) found that community participation (β= .25, p<.001) and community satisfaction (β= .04, p<.01) were positively correlated with community-based Internet use.

The results contradict the arguments made by Putnam (1995) and Nie and Erbring (2000). Their arguments are based on the much researched displacement theory (Finhoult and Sproull, 1990; James, et al., 1995; Robinson, et al., 1997), which suggests that different communicative channels compete for the limited amount of time an individual has and the time spent on one channel increases at the cost of time spent on another. It is problematic to use the displacement theory to interpret the relationship between Internet use and offline activities. In the first place, the single measure model fails to capture the diversity of Internet use. Some online and offline activities overlap with each other, which gives rise to questions such as whether online community participation is community participation. In addition, it presumes that the studied channels compete against each other for the limited amount of time. Actually an individual’s time is consumed by various activities. An increasing amount of time spent on one, thus, does not necessarily lead to a decrease of all other activities, but one, or some. Therefore, the author argues that patterns of Internet use are stronger predictors of civic and political engagement than hours of Internet use. It is then advisable for scholars to differentiate Internet use when examining its political impact on individual users.

Findings of the study support this argument. Different participants utilised a number of different Internet applications. For example, only P05 reported usage of online lecture and P06 usage of Twitter, Facebook, and Baidu Tieba. Moreover, the same Internet application is found to be employed by different participants in quite different ways. For example, for P03, Sina Weibo was only used as a platform to receive messages from an online game service, while for P01 and P06, it was an important source of information and a channel to make a difference. It is also evident that different patterns of Internet use bring different consequences. P06’s usage of Twitter and Facebook opened a window for him to see daily life in foreign countries and led to social comparison and discontent with the current system. Usage of microblogging to make a difference is found to be positively related to one’s internal political efficacy and thus encourages political participation.

Another approach is to study the use of a specific Internet function or service such as blogs or online forums. For example, MacKinnon (2007) studied the use of blogs and the government’s censorship in China. She concluded that the government’s control over the Internet has largely been successful in preventing a democracy infestation; especially in the short term, however, blogs and other forms of online citizens’ media served to quietly deepen the space of civil discourse. This approach is inappropriate when the study focuses on patterns of Internet use which have political implications in general. An individual may use a blog to express his or her concerns or opinions about social issues. He or she may use a blog simply for fun or to achieve commercial goals. In addition, this approach is too narrow to capture the full picture of an individual’s Internet use that might have political implications. An individual who uses a blog to obtain political or social information and express political ideas is highly likely to do the same through other channels that the Internet offers, such as search engines, news websites and online forums. Hsieh and Li (2014) find that using multiple media online for communication is positively associated with online political participation. It would be wrong to attribute the effect of the Internet on an individual to a specific function.

Such an approach cannot discover how a participant utilises a number of Internet applications to achieve one goal, as found in this research. For example, P06 used online forums to get to know strangers with common interests, Weibo and QQ to further develop his relationship with strangers into friendship, and offline activities organised using a different Internet application to turn online friends into offline friends. In addition, such an approach cannot find out how a message travels though the different Internet platforms a participant uses. This research saw how a piece of politically sensitive information might be received from a pubic platform like a forum, and then discussed with close friends through interpersonal channels online like QQ, or with roommates or family members offline.

From this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why the results of the studies on the political influence of Internet use contradict each other and why a number of studies failed to see the transforming potential of the Internet in China. Taking Internet use or the use of a specific function like blogging or the online forum as a whole is misleading. In fact, the Internet in China is mostly used as a tool for entertainment (Guo, et al., 2005; CNNIC, 2010). The situation is the same in democratic countries. The use of the Internet for political purposes, as Dahlgren (2005) argued, was clearly minor compared with other purposes to which it was put (p.151). He also concluded that democratic deliberation was ‘completely overshadowed by consumerism, entertainment, non-political networking and chat, and so forth’ (Dahlgren, 2005, p.151).

Therefore, the author argues that one is unlikely to find a significant political impact of Internet use or the use of a specific function of the Internet in general on an individual or a society. However, it is arguable that certain patterns of Internet use do possess the potential to exert influence in terms of politics, culture and society, especially in the process of democratisation. The qualitative data collected from six in-depth interviews, one focus group, search and analysis of web content, and the author’s digital ethnography provide rich details of how the Internet was used by each individual and how each individual understood their usage. More importantly, with a holistic view of Internet use through an individual’s lens, the research offers a chance to discover the mechanism by which different Internet applications are employed strategically or unconsciously by an individual to achieve their desired results and how individuals differ from each other in terms of that mechanism.

Another limitation of the existing literature is that concepts formulated and deeply embedded in the context of democratic countries are employed as the theoretical framework for a large proportion of the studies. A grounded theory approach allows the author to see through the lens of actual users instead of scholars and to establish concepts and theories using the words the participants use. As a result, this thesis provides an original contribution to our understanding of how Chinese university students view the Internet in relation to politics. These findings include how university students disengage from political activities due to both practical reasons such as a lack of opportunity, a lack of interest or ideological concerns such as a revolutionary view of democratisation. It contributes to understand the democratising potential of some online activities earlier studies failed to see. It has been found that seemingly trivial online exchanges may nevertheless contribute to a changing social and political environment – albeit in ways that the participants may not themselves describe as ‘democratising’. For example, the thesis throws light on of the role of apparent political disengagement and online entertainment. Previous studies overwhelmingly portray online entertainment as harmful or erosive to democracy. For example, several studies (e.g. Kenski & Stroud, 2006; Shah, et al., 2005; Wang, 2007; Thussu, 2007) suggested a negative relationship between recreational web use and civic and political activities (Hsieh and Li, 2014). However, democratic potential of online entertainment in authoritarian countries, especially those in transition like China, has been underdeveloped. The thesis provides rich and vivid empirical data to understand how online entertainment like movie-watching created conditions of ideational pluralism and thus potential to challenge the tame ideational climate. A grounded theory approach generates rich and primary interview data from which those findings are derived.

More recent work (eg. Marolt & Herold, 2011; 2014) starts to put more emphasis on the connections between the online and offline worlds, the Internet users, the nuance of the diverse online world and that of individual’s Internet use and understandings. This research joins the endeavours to understand the less-studied field of how Internet users use the Internet and how they perceive and articulate their use. The major contribution of the research is its initiation of a methodology in the area of the political influence of the Internet in China. The grounded theory it employs provides a new approach and fresh views from which to study the invaluable case of China, which differs in many ways from its democratic counterparts. Moreover, the research concentrates on a less-studied factor of the landscape, the individual users. The shift of viewpoint adds a new perspective from which to view the picture and to better understand the situation. As a result, it produces a number of original findings that will be of interest to the broader community of scholars researching China’s Internet in particular and scholars who study the influence of ICTs on the emergence and consolidation of democracy in general.

7.5 Further research

Secondly, the research used in-depth interviews and a focus group to generate data. Both methods rely on the participants’ self-reports. Web data has been collected, but not systematically. To further develop this new methodology in this field of inquiry, attempts can be made to systematically employ other methods of data collection like observation and collecting web data for triangulation. This will add to the picture what Internet users are actually doing online, what content they are exposed to, and what they share and generate. Thirdly, as an initiative effort to understand the political influence of the Internet from the perspective of the Internet users, the research examines Internet use among university students who are a very special group of people in mainland China as elaborated on in Chapter 3. The methods and methodology developed in this research can be used to study other groups of Internet users. Furthermore, the grounded theory approach developed in this research and instruments to measure newly-emerging concepts could be used in cross-national studies.

As to the findings of the research, firstly, there are a number of new themes which emerged during data analysis, but could not be clearly defined. Table 4 demonstrates all the themes emerging from the axial coding among which only some could be clearly defined and contributed to the discussion and the findings. However, several of the others are very interesting and deserve further research. For example, online shopping was found to be very popular among the participants. However, this research cannot provide interpretation of the political meanings of their online shopping. P10 made a very interesting point that the Chinese government as a whole, or as a collection of individual Internet users, also learns more about the outside world through the Internet. His view echoes that of Marolt who perceives the Chinese state as many different individuals, groupings, institutions etc. (Marolt & Herold, 2014). The political influence of the Internet on government officials as individual users has seldom been studied. It would make a valuable study to explore how the changes have been made possible or impossible from inside the system.

Another example is watching films from Western countries online. P05 talked at length about the potential impact of watching American films. She said, “I want to say that the impact is potential. I cannot tell, but I think that there is an impact on values.” She gave an example of how an American mother reacted to her crying baby and said, “I will pay attention to that when I educate my baby in the future. Impact like this. It is just an example.” Again, this theme has not been further investigated in this research. Secondly, there are themes that are clearly defined but result in more questions. For example, why do the participants lack motivation for using the Internet for political purposes? This, in turn, raises several other interesting questions. Why did the participants think social issues exposed online were irrelevant to them? Is it due to how the social issues presented or constructed online, or is it because of their social status? Are they actually affected by those social issues? The study suggested one explanation, but it is far from sufficient.

Concepts like belief in a shock therapy, lack of opportunities for civic engagement, tolerance etc. and the case of P06 and P09 also deserve further attention and research. The participants believed that a comprehensive overturn of the current system to a democratic government was desirable but impossible. It would be interesting to explore in what way the participants think a comprehensive overturn is achieved; what they think a democratic government is; what they think the current polity is; what they think the defects of the current system are; and why they think so. Participants expressed common willingness to participate in civic activities or organisations and attributed their lack of real participation to a lack of opportunity. What is the real situation? Is there a real shortage of civic activities or organisations in China or is it that the participants lacked real motivation and therefore overlooked the opportunities? What reasons lie behind the real situation? Participants reported exposure to many more communicators, extreme comments, opinions coloured by subjectivity, and opinions that they did not agree with online, but only P09 explicitly linked exposure to conflicting ideas and perspectives online to increased toleration of ideas and people different from himself. P09 differed from the other participants in his course, grade, and climbing over the Great Wall mainly for politics, especially politically sensitive topics, blocked books and movies. What Internet use patterns contribute to increasing tolerance? As to political socialisation, why did participants think social problems like transportation safety, food security, inequality, or government corruption were irrelevant to them? How were such views developed?

Both P06 and P09 reported regular climbing over the Great Wall, but for different purposes. P09 used it mainly for politics while politics was just a minor purpose for P06 and he used it mainly for film watching, following stars and friends studying abroad, and buying and selling music CDs. Moreover, P06 read mainly English content, mainly from the UK and the USA, while P09 accessed mainly Chinese content on blocked websites. Another distinct Internet usage for P06 was using various services to make music or travel friends and to participate in such activities. P06 and P09 reported completely different attitudes towards their ability to make a difference through the Internet and a different degree of online political engagement. P06 believed that his ability to make a difference is tiny and was determined to take some action. P09 expressed worry about the great power and uncertainty of the Internet’s democratising potential and was afraid to take any action that he believed would mislead the public. It would be interesting to explore what made the difference. Why did they use it for different purposes? What websites did they really access? And what content did they read?

The last field, that the author finds most interesting, is a comparative study between Chinese people’s Internet use and understanding and that of their counterparts in liberal democracies. The author studied liberal democracy from literature not from people, especially Internet users, in democratic countries. It arouses the author’s curiosity to know how Internet users in democratic countries use the Internet for political purposes and how they understand their use. What do they think democracy is? How does the Internet affect democracy in their countries? What social or political issues do they think relevant to them? Why do they think they are relevant? How do they use the Internet? What do they use the Internet use for? How do they use the Internet for political purposes? To compare their Internet use and understandings with that of their Chinese counterparts would help to better understand and interpret the democratic potential of individuals’ Internet use in China.