Page 90 - 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 089

his son to search for medical information, which had a significant effect on changing his feeling
of inconvenience caused by insufficient digital impact. From the case data, in the absence of
digital social support, the digital poor obviously don’t have a clear preference for types of social
networks, and as long as they can be provided with effective tools and emotional social support on
digital behaviors, their degrees of digital poverty can be reduced.
It is difficult for the composite digital poor of dual types of the social lonely and digital resisters
to get support from strong ties or even weak ties. The four cases involved in this study were all
from rural areas, three of them came from Tianzhu of Gansu, and the other one grew up in rural
Chongqing. In lack of social support and constraints of social norms, their overlapped poverty
status is difficult to change in the short term, and temporary and situational social supports are not
enough to reduce habitual resistance brought about by social norms.
3) Research finding 6: Strong ties have a significant effect on reduction of the composite digital
poor based on vain seekers.
It can be found through text encoding that the composite digital poor who are overlapped on the
basis of insufficient digital impact can get support through and be changed by strong ties. Among
the forty-eight cases supported by strong ties, features of vain seekers were found on seventeen
respondents. The frequency of the features is significantly exceeding that (two times) of the
features found in the twenty-two cases supported by weak ties. In contrast, features of the socially
lonely appeared twenty-one times in the cases of strong ties and eight times in the cases of weak
ties. Therefore, it can be considered that strong ties outweigh weak ties for vain seekers. They
can’t see positive effect of ICT on real life and work, so it is inevitable that there will be emotions
of pessimism and disappointment and lack of motivation, and vain seekers are slightly affected by
ICT. Strong ties, as social relations with relatively high homogeneity of the digital poor, have a
higher degree of mutual recognition with the digital poor. They are more willing to share emotions
resulted from use of ICT in vain with strong ties, and are more likely to seek help from strong ties
than from weak ties.
4) Research finding 7: Weak ties play a significant role only for the socially lonely, and have no
significant influence on the other types of the digital poor.
Among the twenty-two cases in which weak ties play their roles, there are one composite case of
five types of digital poverty, that is, an old man in a mahjong room in YP town of Chongqing, one
case of the psychologically vulnerable, one case of vain seekers, one composite case of dual types
of the social lonely and digital resister, six cases of the socially lonely, and thirteen cases of the
non-digital poor. Considering the limitations of samples, we only understand the value of weak ties
from common sense without fully taking differences between quantities into account now. Only
the digital poor who lack social support will firstly seek help from even unreliable external social
networks such as weak ties. The effect of weak ties on other types of digital poverty is not obvious
in this study. However, it cannot be concluded that weak ties are of little value to the digital poor.
It is found in the field study that the Evergreen Education Foundation, as a weak tie, invested a