Page 103 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

YAN Hui / Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China 103

of ICTs (Kvasny & Keil, 2006). Cultural space refers to public Internet sites and other related
physical spaces which construct and carry a certain cultural connotation, and metaphorical places
for individuals to communicate (Kvasny, 2006). The structure of information resources is the
cultural polarization of contents on the Internet (such as the absolute advantage of English web
pages) and the lack of regional or local information related to the needs of digital poor people
(Kvasny, 2002). Fieldwork in this study found that rural residents with high levels of education
are less likely to fall into digital poverty than those with lower levels of education; those who are
in extremely digital poverty are all below primary school. The language skills of rural residents,
especially their abilities to write and communicate, have a direct impact on their skills and level of
use of ICT equipment, especially the traditional typing skills. In the traditional agricultural society,
rural residents’ cultural traditions of emerging technologies, experiences on manual laboring and
agricultural cultivation determine their rejection of ICT equipment, and thus their habitual wait-
and-see attitudes in farming and the resistance reaction to digital civilization determines the high
probability that they will fall into digital poverty. The lack of public digital cultural space in
rural areas makes it easier for rural residents to become digital poor people than urban residents.
Although the central and local governments in China are pushing for a public electronic reading
room program (H. Yan & Lin, 2014), it is theoretically possible to increase rural residents’ chances
of getting out of digital poverty. However, in fact, the 13 villages we have chosen have public
access to public electronic reading rooms built by public finances, but their effectiveness and
efficiency are extremely low. There is still a wide gap between the current macro structure of
information resources and the production needs of rural residents. ICT devices are more able to
meet their entertaining needs than to help them escape from digital poverty, their needs to create
more wealth. The poor cultural capital cannot be changed overnight, and they are often intertwined
to have a profound and long-lasting effect on the digitally impoverished rural population.
The structural elements of social capital include personal networks, social networks, social
institutions and locations. There are differences between personal networks and social networks.
The former is used to measure social relations at the individual level of society and its effects
in assisting their accessing and using ICTs; while the latter is used by scholars to assess
national policies and political environments restricting informal networks and relationships
on organizational level, particularly national restrictions on the establishment of civil society
organizations (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2005) and the development of social support and social
capital in a country or society. In addition, social institutions and locations also shape the
differences in ICT applications among individuals in society, to a certain extent, determining social
stratification, structural inequalities in society, and unequal distribution of social resources (Van
Dijk, 2005). Although rural China is a typical acquaintance society, the high homogeneity of its
internal social capital determines the simple structure of personal networks and social networks.
When ICT equipment enters into such an internal social structure, most residents are not familiar
with external social capital that holds more digital resources, and they are hard to move out of