It looks like the fearsome internet meme has spread through Chinese culture. Wired's recent story about an internet addiction camp includes this background sketch:
one of China’s most feared public health hazards... The camp’s brochure claimed that an estimated 80 percent of Chinese youth suffered from it. Fifteen-year-old Deng Senshan seemed to be among them. He was once a top student, but his grades had plummeted over the past couple of years, and he had stopped exercising almost completely. He spent most of his time playing games like World of Warcraft at Internet cafés or on his desktop computer. The Chinese news media was filled with terrifying stories of WOW-crazed kids dropping dead or killing their parents, and Deng Fei and Zhou Juan worried that they might lose their only son to a technological demon they barely understood.
The meme might be fed by the state:
The Net was not just a public-health hazard but a national-security risk. In 2006, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League openly fretted about a “severe social problem that could threaten the nation’s future” and called Internet cafés “hotbeds of juvenile crime and depravity.” Official figures claimed that the Internet was responsible for up to 80 percent of high school and college dropouts and most juvenile crimes. A show on state-run television described the fight against Internet addiction as the Third Opium War.
Does anyone have good info on this meme in China? We've been focusing on American culture here, primarily.
Interesting meme - one that seems to fit within a broader trend of raised state concern for controlling digital realms in C. over this past year.
For another, quite different look at WOW in China, and for comparisons re: WOW between China and the U.S., see the work of Bonnie Nardi (Dept. of Informatics, UC Irvine). An interview at the China Beat introduces her research nicely:
http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=260
Posted by: Susan Fernsebner | January 19, 2010 at 10:38