Keywords: new media and society

Despite of abundant achievements in quantitative digital divide research within global contexts and western countries, there are still few concern on qualitative examination of digital usage gap in developing country, like rural China. On the other hand, existing studies focused more on how media are accessed and used across adult populations, instead of children and students, although digital divide and knowledge gap theory rose from the correlation between media use and children education. This current research extends the area, methodology, and subjects of digital divide studies by a field investigation of digital access, digital usage, and knowledge gap in a Chinese rural primary school. A village primary school located in Henan province in northern China was selected, which included 247 pupils and 14 teachers. Based on two-month field observation and in-depth interviews with 3 teachers as well as 30 pupils in grade 3-6, this paper deeply explored the technical apparatus and internet accessibility at home and at school, and the pupils’ autonomy, variation, motivation, interests, skills, and availability of social support when using new media technology. As a result of digital divide, the pupil’s knowledge gap were also investigated.

It found that: (1) rural pupils’ technical and internet access at home and at school is much better than before, which means urban-rural access gap is narrowing in China; (2) pupils’ autonomy of new media use is not encouraged, or even controlled by their teacher and parents; (3) Unitized desktop computer and projector are the main educational media channels at school, while mobile phone and desktop are mainly used for entertainment at home for pupils; (4) recommendation of teacher, online ads, and Baidu are the information sources for selecting online learning apps to assist homework among students, while their new media creative practice are scarce; (5) pupils’ motivation and interests for new media use lie in convenience, vividness, and relaxation, instead of the desire to acquire more knowledge; (6) rural pupils’ technical self-efficacy and skills of use score lower compared to urban peers; (7) availability of social support is almost blank in this school; (8) knowledge acquisition, ideas construction, social participation, and individual development are the main knowledge gap between urban-rural pupils. Overall, these findings deeply describe the current condition of digital divide in rural China. Perhaps bridging the digital usage gap and knowledge gap, especially helping rural pupils to set up intrinsic motivation, interests, and skills to independently use new media technology for learning, are the effective strategies for rural education in developing countries in future.