https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

The Rise of the Creative Class

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

It would not be hard to construct a compelling argument that the spread of mobile communications has been the most disruptive technological force of the past decade. The most successful consumer electronic device of all time (now more pervasive than television or even wristwatches), this untethered version of the familiar telephone handset has launched democratic revolutions, economic transformations, and social upheavals in developed and developing nations alike. A decade after the first of Manuel Castells's trilogy on the network society was released, this book is in many ways an empirical validation of some of the theses advanced in that gargantuan tome. In a sense, what Castells and his colleagues are saying in this book is that the network society is everything he said it was in 1996, but more so because mobile communications allow networks to embed themselves not just in social and 119 political organizations, but in our very bodies and interpersonal relationships. Mobile communications have been around for some time-it is the personal nature of today's technology and services that really makes the difference. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of the disparate body of research on the social dimensions of mobile communications that has emerged in the past decade from a wide range of social science communities-sociology, communications, geography, and others. In many ways, it should be seen as an annotated bibliography of the research to date. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the geodemographics of diffusion, highlighting both the ubiquity and various new divides in access to mobile communications. Chapter 3 looks at "everyday life" and how mobile communications are used by various social groups, such as families and workers. Chapter 4 gives special treatment to youths' use of these communications. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 delve into various topics of the "impacts" of mobile communications-on spatial relationships, language, civil society, and economic development. For economic geographers, Chapter 1 is the most relevant and provides a comprehensive treatment of the global spread of mobile telephony and related technologies since the early 1990s. Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of a detailed analysis at the subnational level. However, this is no fault of the authors-the research simply does not exist. I have looked for years for good city-level data on telecommunications, but it is rare to find such data for a variety of reasons based on regulatory processes and industry practices. This lack of data is particularly glaring when one looks at emerging economies, where the urban-rural divide is the biggest demographic reality yet is never seen in national averages. For instance, while only about 25 percent of Chinese have mobile phones, at least 80 percent of Shanghainese do. In most of the developing world, the mobile phone is the definitive personal statement of urbanity. The thinness of the geographic treatment of this global phenomenon again appears in Chapter 5, where Castells starts to link the literature to his theories of the "space of flows and timeless time." It is one of the shortest chapters in the book and leaves many ideas underdeveloped. This is disappointing because Castells is one of those rare scholars who can effortlessly span the discourse of social theory and urban economic development in a way that captures the richness of how urban life is choreographed. In the end, this book raises many more questions than it answers. Social research has only just begun to scratch the surface of change in our untethered global society. Compared

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective

The idea of the "digital divide," the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of "network labor" crucial to China's economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information "have-less": migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafs, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond. Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South. Information Revolution and Global Politics series

Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China

The “information have-less” is a social, economic, and political category for millions of rural-to-urban migrants and laid-off workers, who populate the vast gray zone of China's digital divide. Disengaged from institutions of agricultural and industrial production, the information have-less make use of such inexpensive ICT services as Internet cafes, prepaid phone cards, and Little Smart mobile phones. These low-end digital technologies are critical to enhancing labor mobility (both physical and social) and to the formation of “translocal networks”. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of ICT usage in, key city-regions in China and consider the consequences of translocal network formations for evolving information inequality in China. These networks raise key theoretical issues related to regionalism, mobility, and state-firm relationships that impinge on low-end service provision, and stratified patterns of information access and utilization within the have-less populations. We view translocal networks an important socio-economic asset of the information have-less and an arena for the articulation of labor mobility in China’s industrialization process and latest wave of urbanization.

The information have-less: Inequality, mobility, and translocal networks in Chinese cities

This book provides a balanced and nuanced study of how the super-sticky WeChat platform interweaves into the fabric of Chinese social, cultural, and political life. It keeps the wider global and national social media landscape in view and compares and contrasts WeChat with Weibo, QQ and other Western social media platforms.

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Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society

This article develops the critical concept of digital utility through studying the case of DiDi Chuxing and the platformization of transport services in urban China. By examining DiDi’s business mo...

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Jack Linchuan Qiu

Papers

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective

Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China

The information have-less: Inequality, mobility, and translocal networks in Chinese cities

Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society

Digital utility: Datafication, regulation, labor, and DiDi’s platformization of urban transport in China