Abstract
Drawing upon narratives from China’s ‘E-generation’ (the urban only-child generation), this study explores how the Internet as a cultural tool is actually being taken up by young people and made meaningful for themselves within the socio-cultural context of today’s China. The narratives revolve around their perceptions and experiences of the net in some major domains of their lives: recreation, the self, learning (study/work) and sociability. It shows that the importance they attached to the Internet for recreation (and the less importance for the other domains) is directly related to their social–biographical situations. Assigning relevance and meaning of the Internet to their lives, the participants drew different aspects of these situations into the foreground, such as, inter alia, only-child status, high parental expectations, the exam-oriented educational system, being young, lack of authority in the family and society, the competitive labour market, and the ‘emerging adulthood’ in the only-child family.
