Book Review

The Next Billion Users

Digital Life Beyond the West
- Payal Arora

Part 1: What is the author attempting to achieve by writing the

book?

● The author is writing the reality behind the development of modern technology.
She’s argued that technology was developed for the global poor and explained
how the global poor are shaping the technology.
● The upper and lower, rich and poor all have the same tendency to use the social
media platform for leisure. The global poor are overcoming the issues of
socialising in their community and development in technology in many parts of
the world are driven by a desire to have fun and not by necessity.
● The author heavily criticizes Sugata Mitra - the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment that
plopped computers in villages and Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child
program with the belief of transforming the education sector. The western way of
thinking is that technology will replace the old fashion structures like schools and
teachers through self-learning(Mitra’s The Hole in the Wall project and silicon
valley AltSchool programs)but the reality is that humans tend to find an easy way
for living happily which turns out to be a pleasure.

Part 2: A brief summary of what the book covers

The Leisure Divide

Payal Arora talks about the results of research of the online lives of poor people in
countries such as India, South Africa, China​. ​She argues the global poor use online
media not only to study, fill government forms, find jobs, checking for information on
crop prices, aid agencies and obtain health information, but also to browse for porn,
listen to music, watch entertainment videos, play games for pleasure and fun. In the
process, they often neglect issues related to privacy and social norms.

Deviant by design
 In the suppressed culture like India’s, brazil, china, expression of sexuality has
taken place through various social outlets, consumption of porn, music video, through
pirated media is common. People use any technology available to them for pleasure
and happiness.

Media Bandits
Illegal consumption of corporate media has become the norm outside the West.
This is because tickets, CDs, and DVDs are expensive for the poor. This calls for a
formal system by large firms for the global poor to legally allow them access to sources
of entertainment
The Virtuous Poor
The poor are being praised for skills in frugal innovation and being part in the creation of
new technology. The south-east is taking new forms/challenges for social
entrepreneurship like hackathons, chinnovation, etc.

Slumdog Inspiration
This chapter is a cautionary tale about the undue hype around fun automatic learning
and tech-centric ways of enhancing teaching.
One Laptop Per Child initiative, The Hole in the Wall project, etc. are projects that were
experimented on the poor with a positive output on self-learning practice. But recent
studies show that children do need a certain amount of personal guidance to thrive.

The Poverty Laboratory

“Poor people should not be guinea pigs for new technology. The simple fact that a given
technology is new should not in itself justify using it to experiment on the poor,” says the
author. Technology apps used by children in isolation from schools, communities, and
other traditional support systems. Developers of educational gaming applications sell
their wares by claiming that they can replace teachers and schools but a number of
high-tech school like AltSchool is shutting down where such educational games,
self-learning methodology was been followed.

Privacy, Paucity, and Profit

Here, she talks about how privacy varies person to person, varies from religion, region,
gender. Companies use users’ personal data to target with personalised
advertisements. She talks about how this affects the user.

Forbidden Love

The new social platforms have created a space for datings and socialisation, appealing
to romanticism in youth.
Digital social networks like Facebook have allowed low-income youths to be free of
social norms to pursue their romantic callings.

Part 3: An evaluation of whether the author achieves what he or

she sets out to achieve. If yes/no, how?

In my opinion, the author is trying to enlighten the reader of the misconceptions around
the use of technology by the lower strata of society.

I think the author has been successful in achieving this goal. I, as a reader already have
a whole new dimension to how I think poor people use the internet. We can’t talk about
society without talking about the individual m and neither can we talk of the individual by
avoiding the society. The need for happiness and pleasure and social validation guides
us all, rich or poor, just in different levels and different ways. This realisation was
enlightening for me as well

The author also seems to be able to convince the reader that the results are valid on a
much grander scale and not limited to one country or ethnicity. Generalised results are
the soul of good research, since then we know we have struck on a primal human trait
and not some cultural construct.

The author is able to achieve this goal by connecting the evidence she has with the
technology we use every day. For example, when she talks of Facebook we are
reminded of the desire for social acceptance, and when she mentions the use of
technology for romanticism, popular apps like Tinder come to mind. This very real
connection between the reaser and the issues she presents is enough to convince the
reader of what she is talking about.

Part 4:
Strengths of the book​:
● The author has addressed very real phenomena in the society and has done justice to
the topic.
● The author clearly has done a lot of research into creating this book. This research is
evident in the depth of issues it addresses
● In the research, the effect of mass consumption has been taken into account.
● The book isn’t just a superficial collection of observations, it addresses each aspect of
this shift in the use of technology.
● She has covered not one but ten aspects of this shift, a chapter devoted to each. The
modular nature of the book makes it readable and allows the reader to compartmentalise
the issues as well as see it as a part of a larger whole.
 ● Each topic is dealt with in-depth analysis and very real conclusions.
● Ample examples and instances have been provided, along with names of the various
internet sources. All this allows the reader to connect to the stakeholders talked about in
the article.
● Not only are the problems addressed, but she has also provided solutions in a large
number of places. The solutions provided are practical and useful and the reader can
easily connect the solutions to the problems.
● The week researched content is complemented by a good and practical writing style.
There writing is logical and appropriate words are used where required.

Weaknesses of the book​:

● Although the book seems to deal with the social impacts of technology well, it doesn’t
offer much in terms of individual effects of technology.
● It is quick to pass judgements and vilifying the creators of technology and soft towards
the people using them in a haphazard way.
● The solutions presented to the problems are only sparse, and whenever they are
presented, they aren’t immediately actionable.
● The book lacks an explanation of how the status quo came into being. It presents what is
happening in all its glory, but little effort has been taken as to how technology has
evolved around society to what it is today. It tries more to predict the future than learn
from the past itself
● A general synopsis of the effects of all things included is missing.
● The author has mostly mentioned differences in the use of tech on the basis of economic
status. She hasn’t gone deep into how other things like gender, education, parenting
environment, etc play a role in the use and effects of technology to the society as well.

References

1. Arora, Payal. 2019.The Next Billion Users Digital Life Beyond the
West.Cambridge, Massachu setts, and London/England. Harvard University
press

Bibliography
1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197391.3197397
2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/leisure
3. https://medium.com/@sankarshan/leisure-and-the-internet-aee998218bfe
4. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/03/book-review-the-next-billion-user
s-by-payal-arora/
5. https://yourstory.com/2019/07/next-billion-users-payal-arora-digital/amp