Page 85 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

084 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

poverty except the digital extremely poor are listed below (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Overview of cases with different numbers of digital poverty types overlapped.

Table 3 shows all categories of composite digital poverty in sample cases through processing
overlapped types.
1) Research finding 1: Social networks have no significant impact on reducing poverty degree of
the digital extremely poor.
Of the six digital extremely poor cases involved in this study, five were from Tianzhu, Gansu,
and one was from Hunan Province. They did not provide any evidence of digitization during
interviews and other forms of communication. More importantly, none of the six cases provided
any effective examples proving that social networks ever reduced their digital poverty, which
proved my analysis that social networks in which these people live were highly homogenous in
reducing digital extremely poverty. The probability that if one has none, the others have none, and
if one is in poverty, the others are in poverty was very high.
The basic characteristics of these six interviewed cases are that they live in minority areas
or relatively remote villages. Women there, generally housewives, do not participate in social
activities and rarely go out. For example, the middle-aged woman surnamed Shi (the real names
are with held to protect their privacy, similarly hereinafter) in SM village in Tianzhu of Gansu
is a Tujia housewife, the woman surnamed Zeng in SM village is also a typical housewife, and
the 78-year-old grandma surnamed Yang in LY town of Hunan Province is a typical housewife
in minority areas. The other cases are characterized in that they go far away from the social
networks on their familiar land where they were born to work outside. For example, the resident
surnamed Ha in DT village in Tianzhu of Gansu work as a welder on a construction site in Angola,
the woman surnamed Yang in SM village has been working in Xinjiang for more than 15 years,
and the man surnamed Wu in KL village work in Xinjiang for a long time. The reality that they
participate hardly in or stay away from social networks can explain reasonably why they are in the
state of extreme digital poverty.