Page 100 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

100 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

The 8 types of digital poverty appear frequently among the rural residents in China. Generally
speaking, traditional digital divide and information inequality research focus on the physically
poor and the digitally illiterate, and their proposals for public policy usually concentrate on helping
people on the wrong side of the divide get access to digital tools with broadband connections, and
moreover prepare them literacy and capability to be digitalized. However, through field study I
discover other groups of digital poor individuals, who are more widely distributed in rural China
information society and deeply immersed into vulnerable, idle, resisting and lonely states when
facing ICTs. Their digital poverty is supposed to be produced by interweaving of their different
levels of digital psychology, efforts, social norms, and social support. Vain seekers are unique
people, who are partly digitalized by equipping with modest digital tools, services, and adequate
psychological preparations, and abilities, sometimes incapable of getting high-quality social
support and feeling struggling and resistant in social norms. Moreover, their digital efforts cannot
bring effective social impacts to change their cognitions of digital progress and revolution.
The digital extremely poor rural residents are supported by evidences collected from all fields,
especially villages in Western China. Taking Dingshu Village as a typical sample, nearly all the
residents didn’t prepare themselves with sufficient digital psychological conditions and capabilities,
even without devoting any energy and time into accessing and using ICTs in a traditional closed
society. Although there is a computer with limited connecting speed in the village office for
public affairs, nobody in the village but the clerical staff is capable of managing the device. In
their digital social norms, digital tools and phenomena are still in disagreement with their daily
life, and furthermore their homogenous social capital around the village cannot be borrowed to
support them with efficient instrumental and emotional effects. The village receives no positive
influence from ICTs, which could be figured out from my two visits to it. No big change in process
of digital revolution happened to their daily life and farming from the first field study in January
of 2013 to the follow-up visit in July of 2016. An obvious signal of digitalization was transmitted
by one accidental online game-playing moment on mobile phones by four villages during my in-
depth interview with the same village head in the second time. Besides, some village committee
members mentioned a story about failure in recruitment of Taobao village agent when I found a
piece of paper with words of advertisement on it which was stuck in the gaps of the glass window.
Unfortunately, only a few youngsters tried the recruiting and finally failed to be employed by the
Taobao village program. I tend to understand the result in the staged conclusion of high relevance
of vain seekers and digitally poor people and possibility of flowing between them.
In the context of my field studies in 6 provinces and municipalities, different types of digital
poverty appear in diverse structures and rankings. In the fields of Western China, the rankings in
terms of frequency are the physically poor, the digital illiterate, digital resister, the psychologically
vulnerable, the socially lonely, the digital extremely poor, the digital idle, and vain seekers.
However, in the Middle and Eastern China, number of the physically poor is only larger than vain
seekers and the digital extremely poor.