Digital immigrant can be defined as the person who grew up before the Internet and other digital devices were ubiquitous, and so have had to adapt and learn these technologies. As the result of digital gap between urban and rural area, tremendous amount of migrant workers who receive limited digital information training in their rural birthplace but work in urban area suffered from inconvenience because of highly-developed digitization, in terms of living and personal development. These digital immigrants can also be regarded as information disadvantaged group.
When digital devices are affordable to more and more people, the purpose of this paper is to provide muti-dimensional analysis of considerable digital gap and solutions about making more people benefit from digitalization. The research methods include literary analysis, questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews investigation.
The difficulties of these digital immigrants are slotted into the following six perspectives:(1) Survival in information society, (2) Poverty alleviation in information society, (3) Information security, (4) Information literacy, (5) Internet community governance, (6) Information equilibrium. The reasons are analyzed based on three stakeholders: migrant workers, society including their community or working environment, and government.
Under the status quo that people have less patience to read or participate the courses, but prone to spend time on video watching, the solutions consider three following aspects: (1) Education institutions: provide information training and activities for digital immigrants, including skills, legal awareness and Internet morality, to stimulate their participation on Internet community. The method of training may shift from off-line training to online training with clear description of tangible benefits. (2) Government: provide information infrastructure and user-targeted services to help them get better employment opportunities; designing information poverty alleviation on macro and micro level; introducing rights security laws, and construct information consumption market which are available for digital immigrants as well. (3) Society: providing more information services in community, libraries, universities, holding more activities to help digital immigrants learn information access, upgrading services by fully considering their disadvantage and requirements. The communities and employees should also combine the training and application of disadvantage group with the pattern and incentives they can adapt.
During the case study we find the solutions which combine the government, public institution, employer and experts may assist the immigrant workers more. In this case, the local television station used TV program to attract followers, meanwhile created official account in social media to deliver employment information as well as some suggestions in working or living provided by experts. The organizer of this program also worked together with local human resource bureau, business association, companies, holding both on-line information sharing and off-line recruitment activities, helping thousands of immigrant workers find appropriate jobs and improving their information access.
In brief, improving the information literacy of information disadvantaged group should focus on changing their habits and ideas to ultilize convience brought by digital revolution. which requires the efforts of government, community, employee,etc.