Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China

• 作者: YAN Hui
• 来源期刊: 中国图书馆学报年刊(英文版)
• 学科: 社会科学
• 关键词: DIGITAL POVERTY STRUCTURAL POVERTY DIGITAL INEQUALITY COMMUNITY Informatics
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（1）
• 页码范围: 93-111
• 页数: 19页
• 分类号: G259.2

摘要

When information and communication technologies and information resources produce more GDP and social wealth, create more jobs, improve efficiency of governance and business, and increase residents’ income and life quality, they are challenging social resources distribution mechanism, poverty alleviation and social balanced development by nurturing digital poverty. The paper proposes three research questions: 1) What is the essence of digital poverty? 2) What are the typical categories of digital poverty phenomena? 3) What are the structural factors and how do they determine the different sorts of digital poverty?The author finished a large scale of and long time field studies on digital poverty in rural China, including 4 provinces and 2 municipalities. 337 rural residents participated in our in-depth interviews, focus groups and social experiments. Content analysis method is employed to construct definitions of digital poverty and structural poverty, categories of digital poverty, and structural origins. The paper defines digital poverty as a multi-dimensional phenomena and status of social individuals on 8 digital elements, including digitally physical tools, digital services, digital abilities, digital efforts, digital social norms, digital social support and digital social impacts. Based on the 8 core digital elements, I recognize and describe the following typical categories of digitally poor communities: physically poor communities, digitally illiterate communities, psychologically vulnerable communities, socially lonely communities, digitally idle communities, digital resisters, vain seekers, and the digitally extremely poor. Furthermore, structural poverty is defined in comparison with individual and cultural poverty, and structural origins of digital poverty are distinguished and proved by field evidences. Four structural factors covering economic capital, cultural capital, social capital and political capital are impacting typical sorts of digital poverty separately and comprehensively. Finally, 6 st