Page 63 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

062 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

Digital poverty refers to the lacking status of or barriers in using consciousness, using ability
and economic ability produced by information and communication technologies. The starting
point of digital poverty alleviation should be their access and effective usage of ICT. In the current
public policy and research of rural informatization and digitalization, penetration rate of ICT is
frequently emphasized, while care seldom about rural residents on individual level, and acceptance
status and process of ICT and influential factors. Our research seeks for answers for the following
two questions: How are the acceptance behaviors of information and communication technology
featured by rural residents? What factors are typically impacting their acceptance status of ICT?

1 Literature review

As an important portrait of digital inequality, digital poverty stands for extreme performance in
context of information practice, and the digitally poor rural residents characterize themselves
with the core concepts of access and usage of ICT, covering digital ability, digital efforts, digital
contexts and social support (H. Yan & X. M.Yan, 2014). Their ICT using behaviors are not
only changing with different contexts of production and lives in rural areas, but driven by their
subjective constructing factors. Therefore, analysis of ICT acceptance behaviors of rural digital
poor residents should include context research of self-attribution and dimensions of digital poverty
and technological behaviors and their influential factors.

1.1 Digital poverty: Attribution and dimensions

Among the literature of digital inequality and digital divide, the reasons for digital poverty could
be divided into two categories. The first category is objective and external perspective, including
economic factor, such as income (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2005; Azari & Pick, 2009; Dimaggio,
Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004; Van Dijk, 2006), economic class (Britz, 2004; Castells, 2001)
and regional development level (Kvasny, 2006), social factor, which means social resources
flowing in the social network (Coleman, 1988; Williams, 2005; Lin,1999; Simpson, 2005),
political capital, human resources, cultural factor, referring to ICT knowledge and skills (Yu,
2010), and other resources closely related with digital access and digital ability. In the discussing
context of objective factors, digital poverty originates from deficiency of the resources and barriers
to get access to them. The second category is the subjective and internal perspective, explaining
the digital inequality from cognitive differences among individuals towards origins of digital
poverty, and furthermore the diversity in their perception of digitally poor situations. Therefore, it
is required to focus on perception of poverty in digital context and absence of digital consciousness
and discover the causes of deficiency in motivation of digital poverty alleviation when attributions
of digital inequality are inspected on micro level (H. Yan & X. M. Yan, 2014; Yu, 2010, 2012).
Thus reasons for rural residents to suffer digital poverty insist of shortage of objective necessary