Page 93 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China 〇a ①

〇b *
YAN Hui〇
School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100082, China

Abstract
When information and communication technologies and information resources produce more GDP
and social wealth, create more jobs, improve efficiency of governance and business, and increase
residents’ income and life quality, they are challenging social resources distribution mechanism, poverty
alleviation and social balanced development by nurturing digital poverty. The paper proposes three
research questions: 1) What is the essence of digital poverty? 2) What are the typical categories of
digital poverty phenomena? 3) What are the structural factors and how do they determine the different
sorts of digital poverty?
The author finished a large scale of and long time field studies on digital poverty in rural China,
including 4 provinces and 2 municipalities. 337 rural residents participated in our in-depth interviews,
focus groups and social experiments. Content analysis method is employed to construct definitions of
digital poverty and structural poverty, categories of digital poverty, and structural origins.
The paper defines digital poverty as a multi-dimensional phenomena and status of social
individuals on 8 digital elements, including digitally physical tools, digital services, digital
abilities, digital efforts, digital social norms, digital social support and digital social impacts.
Based on the 8 core digital elements, I recognize and describe the following typical categories
of digitally poor communities: physically poor communities, digitally illiterate communities,
psychologically vulnerable communities, socially lonely communities, digitally idle communities,
digital resisters, vain seekers, and the digitally extremely poor. Furthermore, structural poverty is
defined in comparison with individual and cultural poverty, and structural origins of digital poverty
are distinguished and proved by field evidences. Four structural factors covering economic capital,
cultural capital, social capital and political capital are impacting typical sorts of digital poverty
separately and comprehensively. Finally, 6 strategic reflections on digital poverty alleviation are
proposed.

Keywords
Digital poverty, Structural poverty, Digital inequality, Community Informatics

As an essential productive factor in digital era, information and communication technology has
proved itself to be effective in increasing GDP and social welfare, creating new jobs, improving
efficiency of governance in governments and business administration, and increasing income and
living standards. Considering the imbalanced distributions of traditional productive factors among
different organizations, various regions and social groups, the degree of inequality in digital society

① This article is a special contribution for the Youth Academic Forum sponsored by this Journal.
This article is an outcome of the project “Social Experiment of Digital Poverty Alleviation: Perspective of Community Informatics
(No.17XNB015) funded by Research Funding in Renmin University of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to YAN Hui, Email:hyanpku@ruc.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-3649-1601