Hong Kong.
The next speaker in this session of The Internet Turning 40 is Chien Chou, whose interest is in exploring the use of the Net by Taiwanese students. Students start working with computers in school from the age of 9, and 100% of schools have Internet access, 78% of homes do, as well. But what uses do they see for the Net? She introduces a sixfold distinction: tool, toy, telephone, territory (e.g. presenting their personal identity in a blog, and joining communities), trade, and treasure of information.
In particular, the study aimed to explore differences between students of different ages; it surveyed some 1,800 students in 5th, 8th, and 11th grade as well as college sophomores. Overall, unsurprisingly, older students had spent more time using the Net, spent more time on it, and had more accounts - sophomores spent almost 4 hours on weekdays and over 5 hours on weekend days online, in fact.
More interestingly, telephone (including general communicative) uses were more important for 8th graders than for any other group, while each group ranked tool and toy uses most highly; trade uses were ranked most lowly for the most part. The hihgh ranking of communicative functions by 8th graders may be explained by the fact that this age is an important time for identity formation and group formation; the fact that sophomores ranked 'territory' somewhat higher than other groups may be related to the fact that at this age students were more likely to create and share their own content.
Overall, too, sophomores had the most generally positive view of the Net, 5th graders the least positive; for 8th and 11th graders, there was no substantial difference between most of the six dimensions. Also unsurprisingly, the more self-motivated students were to use the Net, the more positively they viewed it. Students who spent more time on the Net during weekends also seemed to have a more positive attitude, which may be explained by the type of uses (probably largely entertainment) they made of the Net on weekend days.
