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

Abstract

The 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 that 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 geolinguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and its degree of isolation. Our sociological investigation reveals a greater role of cultural proximity than access blockage in explaining online behaviors.

Keywords:

• access blockage
• audience duplication
• censorship
• China
• cultural proximity
• culturally defined markets
• Internet
• filtering
• globalization
• media choice

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank James Ettema for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. 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 acknowledge the terrific editorial support and direction from the editor of The Information Society. We thank Rufus Weston, who enabled the project by providing us access to the comScore data through BBC Global News.

Notes

¹This information has been taken from comScore's own documentation on methodology that is only available to subscribers.

²The methods GreatFire uses for detecting GFW blockage are explained at https://en.greatfire.org/faq

³To clarify, our approach aims to describe and analyze existing CDMs, while refraining from reifying a unified cultural logic behind identified CDMs. For instance, by illuminating the existence of a Chinese CDM, we do not imply about “Chineseness” or a possible realization of a “Chinese civilization-state” (cf. Tu 1991/2005).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by a graduate research grant from Northwestern University.