The Internet has gained increasing popularity in the recent twenty years, and numerous services and products are provided online. However, the inevitable digital divide has differentiated people living in the same society into IT rich and poor. As world population is irreversibly aging, the elderly will be the largest IT inability group because of the digital divide. One information inability is their lack of access and capability to use internet. In China, despite many elderly-aimed ICT projects are carried out, internet prevalence rate among the elderly is lower than in Sweden. Successful online applications or services in western society finally proved total failure in another, which gives the designer and developer a good lesson to learn: to design or provide a kind of application to users across cultures or nations is more than simply interface language translation. Studies on cultural differences provide scholars in ICT field a good reference on how to take cultural issues into product design and applications, to make the applications and services more culture-friendly. Therefore, the research is carried out on elderly internet usage in China in comparison with the situation in Sweden: by comparing the elderly people‟s experiences, perceptions and expectations for the internet in these two countries, differences are analyzed from the perspective of cultural differences and an in-depth analysis of unique problems of Chinese elderly people internet use is given. By comparing China and Sweden, which are defined as countries under absolutely different cultural systems, implications on Chinese elderly people‟s expectations and requirements for internet are proposed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-90242 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Sun, Li |
| Publisher | KTH, Skolan för informations- och kommunikationsteknik (ICT) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Trita-ICT-EX ; 301 |
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