Book Reviewed: The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West by Payal Arora

Choosing the Digital Life in a Chaotic World

There are numerous books in literature about the perils and promises of the digital and social-media revolution. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, weblogs, smartphones and distance-learning have impacted the culture of global youth, especially those from developing countries. Some of these changes are regarded as breakthroughs in education, information gathering, and human progress. But authors like Arora argue that the digital divide has helped create a climate of false sense of reality. Declining reading habits, no time for schoolwork, withering attention spans, and unhealthy effects of peer pressure on young people of poorer countries have caused insecurities. Addiction to games, entertainment, and pornography appears to make them happy. Digital social networks like Facebook have enabled low-income youths to break free of traditional social norms to pursue their passions. On the other side of the spectrum, users of social media have drawn the attention of the corporate companies who seduce them with advertising just like they do with users in the West. Facebook has become an equalizer between the rich and the poor in online corporate marketing.

The author believes that the poor do not need more innovation if it is a proxy for pilot projects. They are better off without them, and without motivated communities, technology will not succeed, says author Arora! Liberal professors like Arora believe that corporations must get more involved in societal issues facing developing countries. Her motivations and beliefs are less helpful to countries like India and Brazil. She frequently refers to the so-called slums of India and Brazil, but slums also exist in Europe and North America. She is familiar with slums of San Francisco and must have seen the Skid Row district of Los Angeles. Her solutions to the problems of technology for poor is like Nike’s “Just Do It” right campaign. She comes short on the measures social media must take to educate the poor kids of India and Brazil. But corporations also have responsibilities to its stockholders, and the community they serve. There should be a balance between the two strategies. One dictates the other!

Technology creates our world; it creates wealth, economy, and our way of living. Does technology, like biological life, evolve? Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico have concluded that the answer is, Yes! Pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions in his book “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves.” Branching networks are found at every level in biology from a single cell to the ecosystem. Human-made networks could share the same features; and if they don't, then it might be profitable to make them do so! That is how technology evolves! Nature's patterns tend to arise from economical solutions. Evolution propagates this flourishing organization. It creates new niches into existing organism or human technology. This respectively creates new creatures or new technology. There is a parallel in evolution in biology and economics, and Brian Arthur and Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico have been more convinced in this little idea that many of us overlook.

This book is very narrative about the negative impact of social media on third world. The author gets very preachy but little on solutions. Do not expect much from this book as it does not add anything new to the burgeoning literature that is already cluttered with unwanted gospels of hypocrisy.