Page 106 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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

The digital illiterate, the psychologically vulnerable and the socially lonely are almost always
affected by the combination of cultural capital and social capital. Despite of their different contexts
of poverty, they result in similar trends in poverty. The more illiterate you are, the less you are
willing to be digital, and the more you are lonely in social support, the poorer you will be in digital
world. The level of education, cultural space and cultural roles in cultural capital does not largely
break the barriers when they cannot use ICTs, are reluctant to use ICTs and difficult to seek for
support from social ties. Sometimes even appropriate and accessible social capital cannot help the
poor totally overcome their plight in which they have no sufficient ability use it or no willingness.
Rural residents who are hard-pressed to boost confidence and lack digital motivation and interests
are struggling to overcome psychological barriers in the short term even with adequate internal and
external social capital to help them with ICT skills and ready social support.
The digital idle often do not possess basic ICT skills, lack the basic motivation to change
traditional cognitive habits and behavior habits, and turn a blind eye to the digital social support
around them. Their children sometimes take the initiative to help their idle parents learn ICT skills,
but finally end with failure helplessly. The most prominent feature of such poor people is their lack
of time, fear, exclusion, excitement of emerging things such as ICTs, and their lack of recognition
and positive evaluation of digital culture, even with minimal experience in using them. There is
one typical example from the director of the village branch of Women’s Federation in my fieldwork
in Mifeng village of Anhui. She cannot use computers and cell phones to surf the Internet and chat
with her child who is studying in college in another big city. Even though her office is specially
equipped with computers and hand-writing input board, she seldom use them.
The digital resisters are the most special type of digital poor in the study. They insist that ICT
devices such as computers have a negative impact on children’s learning more than positive, and
that women and the elderly should not prioritize the use of ICTs. In their opinions, computers
and other modern digital tools are stylish gadgets that are incompatible with rural conservative
culture. They argue that young people are most likely to use computers or mobile phones to
surf the Internet. Although they show some advantages, such as respecting traditional life and
culture, recognizing the mainstream values, such as the test-oriented educational concept that is
overwhelming with their test scores, they are critical of new things on the sidelines, and therefore
approaching the state of the digitally extremely poor. Even with the digital ICT entities within their
reaching sphere, basic phonetic and cultural literacy, access to social support resources, priority
political status with priority of using ICTs, they remain distant from digitalization.
Vain seekers are similar to digitally extremely poor people in digitalization, they are all deeply
influenced by the structural cultural capital, social capital and political capital. There are many
reasons why the digitization needs and motivations of futile ones and their results of initial use
of ICT are different. On the one hand, basic social support and social norms cannot help them to
complete a digitization task thoroughly; on the other hand, the cultural roles and political status
they shoulder do not require the adoption of ICT as a mandatory working tool. In the digital