During the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic, technology adoption for maintaining daily living, and gathering information became near ubiquitous overnight. In the United States and China, universities moved to remote online education, non-essential personnel were asked to work from home, many businesses were forced to rapidly embrace online purchasing and even entertainers held concerts on social media platforms. People's daily lifestyle changed dramatically. Because of pre-existing inequities in society, socially vulnerable populations have often faced barriers to access to resources, education, healthcare, and employment. This situation has been accentuated amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. These socially vulnerable populations often include underserved and marginalized groups. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many inequities and challenges for said populations especially in regards to technology. By definition, socially vulnerable populations may differ from region to region. Those often marginalized and underserved include people with disabilities, certain racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, and children, among several others. In general, these populations tend to face disproportionate difficulties before, during, and after major disasters. As the COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact globally, including infecting hundreds of millions with a total mortality of over 6 million, there was also an increased use and adoption of technology.
This special issue collects three research papers from a variety of perspectives with a focus on different groups of marginalized populations across an international environment, responding to the call for papers on key issues and lessons learned on technology adoption among socially vulnerable populations during COVID-19. We believe that the lessons learned from the current pandemic and a comprehensive understanding of the differential technology adoption for activities of daily living would be able to get people more prepared for and respond to future crises. The papers of this special issue aim at answering the following questions: During the COVID-19 global pandemic, how has technology adoption impacted (1) the digitalization process in developing countries, (2) the lifestyles of socially vulnerable populations, and (3) the difficulties presented to Chinese students during the information seeking processes.
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“The Geopolitical and Socioeconomic Factors of Digitization in Vietnam: Technology Adoption in the Art and Cultural Sector during the Covid-19 Pandemic” by Dr. Duester addresses the issues and challenges of the digitalization process in Vietnam, including the global digital divide, lack of human resources, technical resources and enough budget, culture, history and social inequalities. The results from 20 semi-structured interviews with cultural professionals indicate that geopolitical and socio-economic factors had an impact on digitization processes, but free open-source platforms such as Facebook offered an opportunity for Vietnamese art and culture to be exposed to people in the world.
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In the paper “Socially Vulnerable Populations Adoption of Technology to Address Lifestyle Changes Amid COVID-19 in the US” by Dubois, et al., the authors used the Lens of Vulnerability to examine how disparities in technology adoption had an impact on activities of daily living in the US. The existing literature and case studies relevant to how the lifestyles of socially vulnerable populations have changed during the pandemic in terms of technology adoption were reviewed and analyzed. The findings indicate that some changes on technology adoption happened to such fields as healthcare, employment, and education, but how COVID-19 has affected government and social services and activities of daily living needs to be further explored. It is worth mentioning that this paper made an effort in providing practical and academic recommendations to improve technology adoption and equitable response at the end.
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Focusing on improving information service and overcoming infodemic, “What difficulties did the college students encountered in information seeking during the COVID-19 pandemic?” by Huang, Wang, Luo, Su & Li researched the difficulties that were presented to Chinese college students when they seek information amid the COVID-19 pandemic. They found that the most frequently mentioned difficulty reason was user-task interaction. Regarding user-task interaction, the difficulty reasons relevant to document features were mentioned most frequently, and then the search results followed. The authors offer suggestions to address such difficulties, such as educating information literacy for the public, promoting information technologies and systems, and improving the censorship and supervision of online speeches.
The technology adoption of socially vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 global pandemic is a critical issue that needs to be extensively explored. This special issue and the findings in each paper of this special issue hopefully raise awareness of the importance of this topic, and draw more attention from researchers and practitioners to further investigate the related topics. It is our long-term research goal to make advanced technologies available, accessible and equitable to socially vulnerable populations and to develop technologies for them to use.