“I cannot go through a day without the Internet”: Exploring the Dynamics of Everyday Uses of the Internet in China

This dissertation examines how people in China make use of and make sense of the Internet in their everyday activities. It is based on the data collected in 7-month ethnographic fieldwork in China in the second half of 2017. In this people-centric ethnography, individual people are considered as contextualized entities whose Internet uses are conditioned in the cultural, political, and technological contexts. In this light, this dissertation presents four self-contained articles that are tied together by a shared framework, and this framework consists of three thematic chapters, covering the cultural traditions, political regulation, and technological infrastructure that condition Chinese people’s everyday uses of the Internet.