Social Capital, Digital Inequality, and a "Glocal" Community Informatics Project in Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, Gansu Province

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 62, No. 1, 2013 (“Community Informatics in China,” edited by Kate Williams), pp. 234–260. © 2013 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract This article examines a “glocal” community informatics project that is transforming villages in Western China. Funded and initiated by the U.S.-based Evergreen Education Foundation (EEF)—an organization that makes public computing resources available to the digital poor and digital extremely poor communities—the project supports the establishment of public computing sites in primary and middle schools, thereby improving villagers’ digital consciousness and digital literacy. This study uses a digital inequality model—organized around a pyramid of five classes comprising the digital elite, the digital rich, the digital middle class, the digital poor, and the digital extremely poor—to assess the impact of this project. The authors found that, on the whole, the EEF’s training programs helped people move up the pyramid of digital inequality.