The Next Billion Users
eBook - PDF

The Next Billion Users

Digital Life Beyond the West

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Next Billion Users

Digital Life Beyond the West

About this book

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 geo-tagging 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.

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Yes, you can access The Next Billion Users by Payal Arora in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Comportamento dei consumatori. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Prologue
  7. 1. The Leisure Divide
  8. 2. Deviant by Design
  9. 3. Media Bandits
  10. 4. The Virtuous Poor
  11. 5. Slumdog Inspiration
  12. 6. The Poverty Laboratory
  13. 7. Privacy, Paucity, and Profit
  14. 8. Forbidden Love
  15. Epilogue
  16. Notes
  17. References
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Index