Page 81 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

Fuel in the snowy weather or icing on the cake?

Exploration of social network’s value in alleviation of
digital poverty〇a
①

*
YAN Hui〇b〇
School of Information Resources Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

Abstract
The paper proposes the following research questions: How do different types of digital poverty
phenomena overlap on social individuals? For what sort of digital poor people do social networks work as
fuel in the snowy weather? And for what sort do social networks work as icing on the cake? In the paper,
the author digs deeply into the case data from 117 digital poor people and 47 non-digital poor people in
rural field research in six provinces and municipalities in China, objectively assesses their key features of
digital poverty, and exactly describes their degrees and types of digital poverty. It is also the goal of the
paper to find out the relationship between different types of social networks, especially strong ties and
weak ties, and digital help-seeking behaviors of individuals of different digital poverty types overlapped.
The study argues that social networks have no significant effect on reducing poverty degree of the
digital extremely poor. The more an individual’s types of digital poverty overlap, the less effective
support he/she gets from social networks. The less types of digital poverty overlap, the more likely he/
she is to get effective support from social networks. Strong ties have a significant impact on reduction
of poverty for the psychologically vulnerable, the digital illiterate, the digitally idle, the socially lonely
and vain seekers. Weak ties play a significant role only for the socially lonely.

Keywords
Digital poverty, Social network, Community informatics

0 Introduction

According to the 40th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China released by the China
Internet Network Information Center in August 2017, China’s Internet penetration rate had reached
54.3%, and the Internet population had reached 751 million, which is unprecedented. However, the
growth rate was only 1.1%, which was close to the lowest in history. To a certain extent, this means
that China’s Internet demographic dividend has gradually disappeared in recent years, and the ceiling
effect has appeared in all walks of life under the constraints of Internet technology. Faced with a series
of social problems brought about by the inadequate and uneven development of the Internet society,

① Special contribution for the Youth Academic Forum sponsored by this Journal.
This article is an outcome of the research 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