Page 82 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

YAN Hui / Fuel in the snowy weather or icing on the cake? Exploration of social network’s value in alleviation of digital poverty 081

it should be a priority for information professionals to give attention to social equity, especially
digital poverty. Digital poverty is a new form of poverty caused by information and communication
technology acting on agents (H.Yan & X.M.Yan, 2014). It is interwoven with traditional poverty,
and also enhances the complexity of poverty and information problems. It is a new phenomenon and
challenge with which information professionals and poverty alleviation workers are confronted.

1 Research method

Based on the author’s previous research, core elements of digital poverty are described as digital
tools, digital services, digital psychology, digital ability, digital efforts, digital social norms, digital
social support, and digital impacts. On this basis, field study data are used to classify digital poor
communities into the physically poor, the digitally illiterate, the psychologically vulnerable, the
socially lonely, the digitally idle, digital resisters, vain seekers, and the digital extremely poor
(H.Yan, 2017). This paper aims to answer the following questions: How are different types of
digital poverty phenomena translated on social individuals? What are the specific effects of
social networks on reducing digital poverty of different degrees in the practice of digital poverty
alleviation? For what sort of digital poor people are social networks as fuel in the snowy weather?
And for what sort are social networks as icing on the cake?
The role that social factors play in the formation and development of digital inequality,
especially the changes of digital poverty phenomena under the influence of various social factors
have been of great concern. Among the various factors, social position (Van Dijk, 2005), emotional
support and encouragement (Dimaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004；Hargittai, 2003),
social networks (Kvasny, 2002; Stroope, 2008), technical assistance (Alvarez, 2003), common
experience (Hargittai, 2008), social institutional environment (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2005;
Levinson & Hervy, 2004; Ho & Tseng, 2006), and social capital (Wang & H.Yan, 2013；H.Yan
& Hong, 2014) are obviously effective. In a community setting, social capital and social networks
have a positive impact on community members and community organizations’ access to and use of
Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially bonding social capital and strong
ties can help community organizations use ICT more widely (Williams, 2005). Weak ties in social
networks are also very prominent in the era of Internet. For example, under the promotion of the
social media Sina Weibo, the non-governmental education-aid organization “Micro Charity” (Kuang
& Huang, 2017) in northwest Hunan province fully utilizes weak ties to match philanthropic
resources dispersed on the Internet and needy students in order to achieve better results in poverty
alleviation. At present, the influence of strong and weak ties in social networks on digital poor
people’s active action to reduce poverty has not been studied in a targeted manner.
Based on the perspectives of Mark Granovetter (1973), Lin Nan (2001), and Andrea Kavanaugh
(1999) on social networks, strong ties in this paper are defined as connections between nodes that can
provide support and help mutually inhomogeneous communities in which people may often meet each