Leesfragment: The Next Billion Users

Dinsdag 9 april gaat Tina Harris bij Athenaeum Roeterseiland met Payal Arora in gesprek over haar The Next Billion Users. Lees bij ons een fragment uit het boek!

A digital anthropologist examines the online lives of millions of people in China, India, Brazil, and across the Middle East—home to most of the world’s internet users—and discovers that what they are doing is not what we imagine.

New-media pundits obsess over online privacy and security, cyberbullying, and revenge porn, but do these things really matter in most of the world? The Next Billion Users reveals that many assumptions about internet use in developing countries are wrong.

After immersing herself in factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas, Payal Arora assesses real patterns of internet usage in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. She finds Himalayan teens growing closer by sharing a single computer with common passwords and profiles. In China’s gaming factories, the line between work and leisure disappears. In Riyadh, a group of young women organizes a YouTube fashion show.

Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance policies appear to care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geotagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend “foreign” strangers on Facebook and give “missed calls” to people? The Next Billion Users answers these questions and many more. Through extensive fieldwork, Arora demonstrates that the global poor are far from virtuous utilitarians who mainly go online to study, find jobs, and obtain health information. She reveals habits of use bound to intrigue everyone from casual internet users to developers of global digital platforms to organizations seeking to reach the next billion internet users.

Prologue

Three billion people, almost half the world’s population, live on two dollars a day. Most are young, live outside the West, and have been acquiring and using mobile phones at a rapid pace over the last decade. In fact, there are just as many mobile phone subscriptions in Nigeria and South Africa as there are in the United States. In China, there are more cell phones than people. India has the most Facebook users; Brazil ranks third.
Obviously, this has excited development agencies, which see in this digital network new opportunities to tackle poverty in these regions. Agencies have called upon Silicon Valley to produce applications that will offer or improve access to jobs, health care, education, and other public services for those three billion. Their work is driven by the assumption that the poor will budget scarce digital resources and limited time online for seeking this information rather than for entertainment. Their attitude is fueled by a deep-seated worldview of the poor as utility-driven beings.
Given the high stakes involved, it is worth asking what has led to this perception of the global poor, especially as this view goes against the vast evidence on internet users in general. Statistics on browsing patterns confirm that the sites most frequented online, whether in a suburb in Ohio or a favela in Brazil, are social networking sites, pornography sites, romance sites, and gaming sites. People enjoy entertainment, romance, gaming, and sex, regardless of their economic status. Thus, it is no wonder that pleasure is at the forefront of digital life. Although this is a readily accepted fact of contemporary digital life in the West, many still cling to the belief that the global poor are inherently different from typical users. Poverty, many assume, is a compelling enough reason for the poor to choose work over play when they go online.
I have been examining computer and internet usage outside the West for almost two decades. The first development project I participated in was launched in a small rural town in the south of India. It was an ambitious project. The goal was to infuse this town with new digital technologies to help the poorer members of the community leapfrog their way out of poverty. We set up computer kiosks everywhere to provide internet access. We envisioned women seeking health information, farmers checking crop prices, and children teaching themselves English through these kiosks. We sent vans with computers to remote villages to build awareness of the potential of the internet. We hoped the villagers would become inspired to adopt these new technologies and would mobilize themselves toward a better future. We funded cybercafés for more tedious tasks, like downloading government forms and searching for jobs.
Months went by and rumors about the project filtered in. People really liked the computer kiosks, vans, and cybercafés, but not for the reasons we imagined. The kiosks had become gaming stations. Children were spending much of their time after school playing PacMan. The vans came to be known as “movie vans”; we showed free movies to draw villagers to the computers. Cybercafés became “friendship cafés.” Many of the café owners swore by social networking sites like Orkut, the Facebook of the day, which kept their businesses alive. Many of the technology development projects I have worked with since have yielded similar results. Play dominates work, and leisure overtakes labor, defying the productivity goals set by the development organizations.
In the face of this evidence, I wondered why there is a pervasive belief that the global poor are more likely than the wealthy to use the internet for practical purposes. Why does the idea of poverty sitting side-by- side with leisure create such discomfort? Does play seem threatening when in the hands of the poor? This question has led me to examine how the global poor have been framed over decades, and who benefits from this kind of framing. I ask what constitutes play and how play relates to labor and productivity. I consider it essential to move away from assumptions and hype to root this discussion in evidence. We need a new narrative that authentically represents online behavior of the global poor, who are rapidly becoming a center of interest in the growing digital economy.
Some recent books have celebrated the empowerment provided by cheap mobile phones. This book instead reveals inherent tensions in global development and new forms of pathology seen through the lens of a powerful triumvirate—poverty, technology, and play. It embarks on intersecting the serious business of poverty and the sacred notion of technology with the supposed frivolousness of leisure time. Through this venture, I confront one of the notable fictions of the digital age—the idea that low-income people will always express preferences that wealthier people assume will improve their economic conditions.
Why should it even be a question, whether people who are poor should enjoy themselves? Why do some people begrudge others who are struggling when they seek an occasional indulgence? Aren’t we all entitled to moments of pleasure and joy? Does poverty have to be miserable? Is productivity a moral requirement of poverty? In the twenty years that I have spent studying the lives of impoverished people outside the West, I have found it common for many in the West to assume that the worldviews of rich and poor are as dissimilar as their lives. “People are products of their environments” is the general Western view. Surely, in conditions of scarcity, people will act in a desperate manner. Civility and dignity are luxuries. Humanity is an act of cultivation made available through wealth.
This attitude may be adjusted only through experience. When I was a teen growing up in Bangalore, India, construction sites surrounded my home. Every day on my way to school I would pass a mother and her teenage daughter who worked at the construction site. I decided to do something good. I gathered some old clothes from my closet, and the next time I passed by, I handed them the package. To my astonishment, they did not want the clothes. I was befuddled and angry at their ingratitude. Why would they reject aid? Their actions seemed irrational. It had not crossed my mind, seeing their state of adversity, that they could be too proud to accept the clothes.
Years later I confronted my assumptions again, this time in a village in the south of India. I was there in a professional capacity, and poverty was now my area of expertise. A health-care worker invited me to stay in his family’s hut, where they fed me a meat-based meal that must have cost them a week’s wage. The family of four insisted on giving me the hut to sleep in while they slept out in the field. Their hospitality and generosity astonished me.
New technology platforms provide an opportunity to discard clichés about the global poor outside the West. A boy in an Indian slum may choose to spend his hard-earned money on mobile credit to chat up a girl. A family in rural Ethiopia may decide to pay a hefty fee to a professional photographer for a top-notch Facebook profile photo. Paraguayan children living in poverty might watch pornography through government-gifted laptops and delete their homework to create space for their favorite music downloads. Amid privacy debates today, a vast, disenfranchised people may take to Facebook with gusto, sharing their lives online in spite of intense state, corporate, and interpersonal surveillance.
These are just a few of the numerous stories that contradict preconceived notions of digital lives beyond the West. Although the dominant narrative suggests that low-income people in developing countries are using the internet and mobile phones to search for jobs, check on their health, educate themselves, and conduct business, such use is barely a fraction of what people do when they go online. For the most part, the poor explore new technologies through games and entertainment and invest much of their energy and scarce income toward what makes them happy. Sometimes play teaches them to bend the rules for survival. Their entrepreneurship may come in the form of strategies to maximize their data bundles for love or may border on the illicit through the building of media piracy empires.
Clearly, this does not fit the picture of what development agencies believe the poor should do with the internet. Many of these agencies see technology as the answer to the intractable poverty plaguing the marginalized majority. How, such agencies ask, could they be frivolous with what could be a tool for their salvation? For postcolonial nations, it is their government’s ticket to national respect on a global stage. When low-income citizens choose entertainment over education through these expensive digital resources, they are perceived as failing the state. When farmers choose to browse for porn on their mobiles instead of checking for information on crop prices, aid agencies are at a loss to justify further funding to mitigate the digital divide. Leisure sabotages the development agencies’ grand plans for global social mobility.
This book explores such expectations of how the global poor should interact with technology, in tandem with the history of institutional and financial arrangements that have made this technology accessible. This history reveals the multitude of demands placed on the poor who play with these new tools. In spite of significant obstacles, the poor continue to play. By clarifying the actual behaviors, practices, and perceptions of those at the margins, I expose why and how fictions and falsehoods are perpetuated regarding the online behaviors of the global poor.

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College