Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior

Abstract

1 We thank James Ettema for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The current version has also benefited greatly from extended discussion with James Webster, Stephanie Edgerly and Edward Malthouse. We are very grateful for the detailed and constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the terrific editorial support and direction from the editor of The Information Society. AbstractThe dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access blockage matters only when such sites are blocked. We examine the case of China, where online blockage is notoriously comprehensive, and compare Chinese web usage patterns with those elsewhere. Analyzing audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites, we find that websites cluster according to language and geography.Chinese websites constitute one cluster, which resembles other such geo-linguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and degree of isolation. Our sociological investigation reveals a greater role of cultural proximity than access blockage in explaining online behaviors.

Mapping an audience-centric World Wide Web: A departure from hyperlink analysis

“…Hence, when seen in the aggregate, global media consumption manifests as an aggregation of many "culturally defined markets", aligned on geo-linguistic lines (Straubhaar, 1991(Straubhaar, , 2007. Although the theory of cultural proximity developed to explain global consumption of television and films, language and geography explain global Web use patterns to a large extent (e.g., Taneja and Wu, 2014). In fact, these cultural factors predict Web use better than hyperlinks do (Taneja and Webster, 2016).…”

“…Taneja and Wu (2014) adapted audience duplication to study global web usage and their findings suggest that cultural factors drive such user centric maps of the Web. Unlike hyperlink analysis, which generally suggests the dominance of a small number of Websites (usually from "core" wealthy countries), an audience centric approach would likely reveal a more decentralized Web structure driven largely by culturally defined patterns of consumption.…”

“…However since any two Websites are expected to have some amount of audience overlap, I considered a tie to exist only when the duplication was above what one would expect by random chance (see Taneja and Wu, 2014). For instance, if in a given time period, a certain Website, say 'A' has a unique user reach of 10% of all Internet users and Website 'B' has a reach of 50%, then assuming the consumption of both are independent events, 5% would be the expected number of users to visited both A and B.…”

The Web as History

“…In other cases, most notably in China, it has been argued conversely that the government and its censorship regime ringfence the web, making it into a cultural resource whose reach is circumscribed by the state. Both ideas are misleading, as Taneja and Wu (2014) have shown: first, in a certain sense, access to the web in China is no less densely bounded off from the global web than is the case for other nonEnglish speaking large clusters on the web. The way that Taneja and Wu arrive at this finding is by examining traffic to the top 1000 websites (which together receive more than 99% share of attention globally), and then grouping these into sites that receive shared attention.…”

Social Theory after the Internet

“…The best example is China, which is often said to be cut off from the global web. Yet this is misleading in some respects: even in this restrictive environment, savvy internet users who wish to get access to information from within and outside the country can for the most part do so, except where online information has been removed altogether (Taneja and Wu 2014). A different way to gauge the global web is to ask: how many companies dominate online attention?…”