Page 107 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

YAN Hui / Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China 107

context, there is not enough pressure to survive, therefore lack of fundamental motivation to
overcome the obstacles. In addition, a very important reason is that such people’s understanding
of digital civilization is biased and extreme. For example, some rural residents encountered in
the fields regard ICTs as luxuries for recreation, not production and wealth creation tools. Their
experience of using ICTs is not only not good for improving the quality of life for themselves and
their families, but it can even be destructive at times. The digitalization of the poorest is almost a
blank space in digital experiences and resources. Most of the 4 core types of structural capital they
possess are copied from traditional societies and elders, thus solidifying them at the bottom of the
digital society.
Instead of denying the influence of individual factors, we analyze the structural causes of digital
poverty attempting to demonstrate that these 8 types of typical digital poor people are increasingly
cross-affected by economic capital, cultural capital, social capital and political capital. Structural
factors make rural residents more difficult to break through even after they have overcome the
barriers brought by individual factors when they get away from digital poverty. They need more
efforts and more resources.

4 Conclusions and implications

Through rich field data and experiences, the paper summarizes the 8 core elements of digital
poverty, namely digital tools, digital services, digital psychology, digital ability, digital efforts,
digital social norms, digital social support and digital impacts. On this basis, according to the
typical characteristics of digital poverty phenomenon, the ordinary digital poor people in rural
China are identified and classified into the physically poor, the digital illiterate, the psychologically
vulnerable, the socially lonely, the digital idle, digital resister, vain seekers, and the digitally
extremely poor. Under the premise of defining structural poverty, taking economic, cultural, social
and political capital as 4 structural causes and using field data to prove its existence, I analyze their
effects on the above typical sorts of digital poverty and emphasize that the individual causes of
digital poverty cannot be ignored, but we need to pay more attention to the structural causes.
Considering the obvious differences of various types of digital poor people and the profound
action mechanism of structural factors on a certain type of digital poverty, the paper proposes the
following suggestions.
First, policy designers should get rid of the traditional idea of information poverty alleviation,
that is, no longer relying on material inputs such as computers and mobile phones, network
connecting services and skills as the core or only direction of efforts. Research shows that the
typical sorts of digital poverty combined by the 8 elements require policy designers to examine
more closely the actual status of the people who are poor and partition the poverty reduction
strategies. If government and society’s input can be sustainable under traditional information
poverty alleviation thinking, it is possible to exert some influence on the external stable factors