Fuel in the snowy weather or icing on the cake? Exploration of social network’s value in alleviation of digital poverty

• 作者: YAN Hui
• 来源期刊: 中国图书馆学报年刊(英文版)
• 学科: 经济
• 关键词: DIGITAL POVERTY Social network Community informatics
• 年，卷（期）: 2018,（1）
• 页码范围: 80-92
• 页数: 13页
• 分类号: F49

摘要

The paper proposes the following research questions:How do different types of digital poverty phenomena overlap on social individuals?For what sort of digital poor people do social networks work as fuel in the snowy weather?And for what sort do social networks work as icing on the cake?In the paper,the author digs deeply into the case data from 117 digital poor people and 47 non-digital poor people in rural field research in six provinces and municipalities in China,objectively assesses their key features of digital poverty,and exactly describes their degrees and types of digital poverty.It is also the goal of the paper to find out the relationship between different types of social networks,especially strong ties and weak ties,and digital help-seeking behaviors of individuals of different digital poverty types overlapped.The study argues that social networks have no significant effect on reducing poverty degree of the digital extremely poor.The more an individual’s types of digital poverty overlap,the less effective support he/she gets from social networks.The less types of digital poverty overlap,the more likely he/she is to get effective support from social networks.Strong ties have a significant impact on reduction of poverty for the psychologically vulnerable,the digital illiterate,the digitally idle,the socially lonely and vain seekers.Weak ties play a significant role only for the socially lonely.