Can the "Third World" come out to play?

Research in Progress Seminar by Arora Payal

Abstract

As billions of dollars are invested in mitigating the digital divide, stakes get higher to gain validity for these cost-intensive endeavors, focusing more on online activities that have clear socio-economic outcomes. Hence, farmers in rural India for instance are watched closely to see how they access crop prices online, while their Orkuting gets sidelined as anecdotal.

This talk argues that this is a fundamental problem as it treats users in emerging markets as somehow inherently different from those in the West. After all, it is now commonly accepted that much of what users do online in developed nations isleisure-oriented. This perspective does not crossover as easily into the ICTD world where the utilitarian angle reigns. Overall, much insight can be gained in bridging worlds of ICTD and New Media studies. By negating online leisure in "Third World" settings, our understandings on this new user market can be critically flawed.

Short bio

Payal Arora (PhD. Columbia University, NY; MEd. Harvard University; University of Cambridge Teaching Certification) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the Faculty of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Her expertise lies in social computing, cyberculture, new media literacies, and international development. She is the author of “Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas”, a book by Ashgate (UK) on social media usage in India and her second book by Routledge, “Virtual and Real Leisure Spaces: A Comparative and Cross-Cultural Analysis”, draws a comprehensive and transnational picture of new media spaces.

Her work has been published in several international scholarly journals and book chapters and her paper on digital information in 2010 won the Best Paper in Social Informatics Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

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For more details, visit her website: www.payalarora.com