Abstract
This study examines how adolescent experience in Internet cafés (known as wangba in Chinese) relates to academic attainment in urban, rural, and Tibetan schools of China. By documenting the frustrations teenagers express in their negotiations with adults surrounding access to and use of wangba and, by comparing self-reported academic standing of students from similar backgrounds with how they differ in their experience in wangba, the study finds that visiting wangba is not strongly correlated with the probability of students reporting either high- or under-achievement. While students without any experience in wangba are substantially less likely to report academic underperformance, the association disappears after matching when the logit regression model is less model-dependent and vulnerable to the problems associated with missing data. The paper concludes that visiting wangba alone is not systematically correlated with academic attainment, and that much adult anxiety concerning adolescent visit to wangba represents moral-technological panic and, offers a simplified explanation for educational problems that have deep macrosocial roots.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Naomi Tan, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, United States Hao Lei, East China Normal University, China
This study examines how adolescent experience in Internet cafés relates to academic attainment in urban, rural, and Tibetan schools of China
While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) begin to influence children’s learning and development earlier and earlier (Dong, 2018; Dong and Mertala, 2019), parents and teachers are increasingly aware of the limitations they have and are alert to the potential risks ICTs might pose to children and young people (Davies et al, 2019), amongst which are addiction to computer games, inappropriate online content, and a decline in academic performance
Summary
According to Lu of Shihong, her father did not want her to surf the Internet in wangba, for people there are “complicated” (fuza) and the environment there “messy” (luan) When it comes to the control of a student’s visit to and experience in wangba, teachers do not differ that much from parents. Yao in School Hengshan, for instance, did not attribute his decline in academic ranking to the technology alone Upon analyzing his own experience and observation, he was not quite sure if there is a direct link between addiction to the Internet and academic performance, just as some recent studies (Etchells et al, 2016; Przybylski and Orben, 2017; Orben and Przybylski, 2019) report about the link between social media use and young people’s health and wellbeing outside China. This study has in-depth interview data borne out of the lived experiences of those affected and, the qualitative findings reported earlier provide some in-depth domain knowledge that is crucial for the decisions made in later analytical processes, but they undergird the conclusions from the quantitative strand that has taken robust measures to establish a fair comparison based on observed covariates and deal with any bias associated with missing data
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