Page 102 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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

reproduction of social classes.
In comparison with structural poverty, individual poverty and cultural poverty includes (Beeghley,
1988; Livesey & Lawson, 2015):
Unemployment on individual level.
Insufficiency of laboring skills.
Intergenerational poverty in labor, income, culture, social resources from imbalanced family structure,
e.g., wife-dominated, single-mother family, large-scaled family.
Inadequate social attributes of behaviors.
Relying culture on welfare and poverty alleviation policies.
Contradictions between matriarchies and patriarchies in families.
Behavior anomie and moral defects.
The cultural poverty is naturally relevant with structural poverty. For example, cultural
mechanism in cultural variables enables individuals with high similarity to form shared values
and behaviors in common living space and surroundings, and thus create structural cultural
environments for their development.
Based on the opinions above, the published research findings (H. Yan, 2011; H. Yan & X.M. Yan,
2014; H. Yan & Liu, 2015; Wang & H. Yan, 2013; H. Yan & Sun, 2012), and field evidences, I
define digital poverty as a structural poverty determined by intertwined economic, cultural, social,
and political capital, rather than results of personal features, behaviors and abilities.
In addition to the income gap, economic capital also includes the economic strata, the
asymmetrical distribution of economic resources and the differences in the levels of economic
development. Class and social capital in social position will overlap, but in the study of digital
poverty, there are gaps in income of different social members (Castells, 2001), and gaps in jobs
(Willis & Tranter, 2006). The asymmetrical distribution of economic resources leads to inequality
in money and property among families and individuals (Fuchs, 2009). Not only has there been a
duplication of economic stratification between urban and rural areas in digital age, but it has also
been duplicated within digital cities. The impact of economic stratum and economic development
level on digital poverty is evident in the fieldwork of this study. Among the digital poor people
identified from the 6 provinces and municipalities, the proportion of residents living in digital
poverty at the village level in western China is generally higher than that of central and the
eastern China, and furthermore digital poverty rate in central is also higher than the eastern part
like the Jinghai samples of Tianjin. Among all the 13 villages in the fieldwork, households and
residents with low incomes have a significantly higher probability of becoming the digital poor
than those with higher incomes. All the samples of the poorest people are from extremely poor
families.
Common elements of cultural capital cover the level of education, language, cultural roles,
cultural space, the structure of information resources. The role of culture is to outline the role
of culture in replicating social inequality into the digital society (Kvasny, 2006) and cultural
traditions, knowledge, skills, experience, and competitiveness that influence the successful use