MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

There are 61 million “left-behind children” in China living in villages away from their parents, who have migrated to large cities seeking employment opportunities. While there is a very limited number of news reports describing left-behind children in rural China as individuals, their access, or lack of access, to cell phones has become an issue of concern, as seen in numerous news reports. As Stuart Hall states, representation is the process or channel or medium through which meanings are both created and reified. “Otherness” is a compelling object of representation in popular culture. Culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system. This paper analyzes how the relationship of this underprivileged group with cell phone technology is presented in recent years in new stories of commercial news media through content analysis of selected samples from sina.com about cell phones and children of migrant worker parents away from home. The paper examines how narratives are weaved about the lives of these children, and how the stories make sense of their unique family experiences with absent parents, who might sometimes be connected through cell phones. The author finds that these children are portrayed in the following types of stories relating to cell phones: 1) as target of sympathy and recipients of charity giving from corporations, local governments and nonprofit organizations; 2) as technology novice with consumer desires, yet unfamiliar with the functions of cell phones; 3) as juvenile delinquents committing crimes related to cell phones. The author discusses the cultural and political implications of empowering the “have-nots” of digital divide, as well the societal anxieties over unsupervised access to technology by adolescents.