The Digital Divide among Minors in the Construction of Digital Villages: Current Status, Causes, and Bridging Pathways

The construction of digital villages has injected new impetus into rural revitalization and brought new opportunities and challenges to the development of rural minors. Based on the three-tier digital divide theoretical framework of “access-use-domestication”, this paper systematically examined the current characteristics, formation mechanisms, and bridging pathways of the digital divide among rural minors. The findings revealed that the access gap between urban and rural minors had been basically bridged, and the digital divide was evolving towards the use gap and domestication gap, presenting the characteristics of “access gap bridged - usage gap highlighted - domestication gap deepened”. The three factors of rural family education dysfunction, rural social support failure, and digital platform power imbalance worked together through a nested coupling mechanism, which were the main causes of rural minors being trapped in the digital divide and might further exacerbate the urban-rural intergenerational gap. To address this, it is necessary to construct a multi-stakeholder collaborative system of “family empowerment - social support - platform regulation”, to help rural minors bridge the digital divide, share the fruits of digital development, and achieve two-way empowerment between digital village construction and youth growth.