Mountains of things

The impact of connected digital media on western society is well-documented. From the early days of Usenet and IRC to the contemporary, vibrant interest around Twitter, Facebook and many others, it has been matched by commentary, books, and the growing importance of new sources to report on constant innovation - such as Mashable and Techcrunch. For consumers and for business, it is a phenomenon that has completely transformed society and allowed the world to shrink, to be faster, and to be more accessible.

For developing communities, their own journeys will be different. If there is a much smaller digital legacy – no telecommunications infrastructure, no 16-bit computers – then much of what we in the west consider to be de rigeur and readily available within society will turn out to be completely new. The ways in which these communities approach, use and develop themselves in terms of digital adoption may deliver interesting, and perhaps very different, results.

That is certainly the case in an area new to digital communication - such as the Himalayas, where Payal Arora spent much of her time researching digital uptake. The stories of how these remote communities, new to digital communications, built a network of cyber cafes that changed the lives of their people is documented in her new book, Dot Com Mantra.

Arora herself is from Bangalore, which, somewhat ironically, she left before it became one of the world's technology hubs. Moving to the US, her interest in the socio-economic impact of digital technology was raised through an invitation from Princeton and the National Health Foundation to examine the impact of digital media on mental health. It was the outcome of this project that took her to Harvard and to work with NGOs such as Oxfam. Direct work with communities in India was a natural subsequent step, combining her own background with the new context of the country within the high-growth BRIC quartet. "If you're going to deal with new technologies and markets, then you can't help but look at India. It's not just the fact that it's an IT hub for multinationals, but it itself is outsourcing to other emerging markets: acting as consultants to emerging markets like South Africa. It serves as a live laboratory."

Arora's subsequent work with HP and a doctorate at Columbia provided the key points behind her recent work. HP "adopted" a rural village near Hyderabad in order to make it a "digital village": a testbed to examine how digital technologies could create higher socio-economic mobility. It is clear that her real interest is working with communities, to see how they, as people and as groups, work with communications technology, rather than to look at these changes more conceptually, or at a macro-economic level.

Thinking big

India is a vast country with incredibly diverse communities and geographies. Towards the latter end of the last decade, the national government published a policy which facilitated the connection of 600,000 villages to the Internet: an investment of around $3bn. The challenge for the communities receiving this money, was to turn this investment into better outcomes for their people.

In spite of India's amazing growth, poverty remains chronic: a stark difference from mostly southern parts which cannot grow quickly enough. A critical point to address in this national initiative was to connect it to better outcomes. There are clear and simple ways to do this, such as the offering of crop prices to farmers, helping them to directly receive proceeds from their crops rather than selling through shady intermediaries, keeping people in something of a vicious circle.

Choosing a small village in the Himalayas was important for Arora, as the area was not seeing many benefits from the country's fast growth; broadband had just been installed there; and she was arriving as an independent researcher, rather than through a sponsor that may have given a particular context or wanted particular outcomes. She volunteered in one of the cyber cafes where computers were generally accessed (rather than in the home). In the Himalayas, the growth of these establishments is around 4000% annually. The customers are often teenagers: college students that work on the computers, as well as just using the cafe as a place to hang out and to socialise with friends.

Although this might suggest that these communities were working with digital technology for everyone's benefit, certain activities suggest otherwise.

"One of the things that I saw was that plagiarism was very open. There is a very systematic way of plagiarising theses, even Masters' theses. [Students] were very sophisticated in their understanding, and knew where to draw from. They were able to pick out information in a very sophisticated way, and bring an entire thesis together from copy and paste."

For Arora, this meant that much of her time at the cyber cafe was being told what to do by students: typing out theses based on plagiarised sources. "'Go down', 'scroll down', 'put that'". Given that her research focused on the adoption of these tools rather than the moral arguments over what was being done with them, their use in this way was not critical to the end result; otherwise, it would have opened up an intellectual and moral debate which was not part of the project's remit.

In the west, you would never see someone instruct someone else to us a computer. However, this mediation infers a second "digital divide" in the Himalayas; although the connectivity and technology is there, Arora suggests that it will be the younger generation that will be actually using these new tools, rather than the parents and older members of the community, who will prefer to order instructions to the users. This mediation of the technology is not unique to the Himalayas, although perhaps its scale is.

This level of mediation was clearly not the case when it came to tasks that were less labour-intensive, and more personal in nature: leisure activities, dating, and socialising. Much of the more recreational activity centered on Orkut, offering a platform for teenage flirting within a more conservative society. This happened to such an extent that Google's social network underpinned the commercial success of these cyber cafes: "If Orkut didn't exist, then these cyber cafes would be shut down. They served as a space where boys and girls could meet and have teenage romances. You can't do that in a legitimate way in a coffee shop in a small town. This was a purposeful space, with boys and girls sitting next to each other. They were flirting with each other, even though [at the time] they were looking at their respective computers."

Orkutting helped to support and to solidify communities as it became a platform used by people that knew each other anyway; it was reinforcing social contact, something familiar to Facebook users in the UK (and Facebook is becoming increasingly popular in India). However, a wider understanding of the potential of the Internet often led users on strange, unforeseen journeys.

"People Googled 'Indian painting', and Red Indians came up. They were fascinated, because they weren't expecting that. Chinese artists painting the 'western cowboy' look would appear, calling their work the 'American painting'. How do [end users] deal with this? It was not a divide, but an experience that took into account multiple parties, with many cultural forms taking place." This "adventure trail" is reminiscent of the early days of the web: not knowing where you're going to end up, because you don't know who has a website and who doesn't - yet."

However, what surprised Arora was that many of these unforeseen encounters were not being dealt with, or intellectually processed, in a way that was below the surface. There were no richer discussions. "Cowboy paintings were American art, because Google said so. It became a skewed sense of reality with a skewed sense of dominance, truth, and knowledge. Very few pushed it further; they don't go two clicks deeper. We find that in learning across the board; we think that we are being efficient in our way of assimilating and understanding knowledge through the Internet, but we are quite controlled by what comes up and often take it on face value. It's a window-shopping experience." Even arranged marriages are now handled in a way akin to "window-shopping". Services, not too dissimilar to something like Match.com, are now available for parents to find appropriate husbands or wives based on pre-emptive filtering.

National importance

The general view of Himalayan communities were that computers played a recreational role in their lives, common with their use in Western societies, although in both cases there are clearly multiple realities and outcomes. When asked about the learnings that Western policymakers and businesses can take, Arora clarifies that user profiles are highly convergent between east and west, although there is currently no common platform: in India, ICT is seen as a development issue, where in the west, it is usually found within Science and Technology.

"The west is very interested in these markets. Work has moved into emerging markets as IT firms have realised that these are the new users; they are going to be prime clientèle in the future, so 'let's get closer to them'. It's not intrigue, it's an economic necessity. These cultural practices are interesting, but their needs are very much like everybody else, which can be comforting. Half the battle is de-exoticising the user. When I find that, in the central Himalayas, that Orkutting is dominant and the most common practices are music sharing, downloading of Bollywood songs, and plagiarism - these are discussions that we are having here, too.

"It's comforting that all of us, regardless of national boundaries, are having these challenges, and that we can learn from each other."

Payal Arora is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University. She is @3Lmantra on Twitter.

"Dot Com Mantra" is out now, published by Ashgate.

Her next book is an examination of the cultural appropriation of leisure, to be published by Routledge in 2012.