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.

"Arora shows that many of the world’s poor don’t seek out the Internet as a tool to become more productive, but as a welcome outlet for economically ‘unproductive’ play…That the Internet fails as a magical cure-all for historical circumstance may be unwelcome news to techno-utopians and overzealous development practitioners, but there is hope in its capacity to augment and expand human leisure beyond the realm of material advancement." - The Nation

"This powerful book explores actual online lives in China, India and Brazil and asks why many of us in the West are surprised and sometimes offended by the fact that the impoverished are just as committed as we are to the search for ‘moments of pleasure and joy.’" - Times Higher Education

"Superb…Uncomfortable, myth-busting, and compelling, The Next Billion Users challenges our collective superiority complexes and questions the way we see technology in the connected world." - Engineering and Technology

"A ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in digital uses around the world…A priceless study, tremendously documented." - Digital Society Forum

"The conventional storyline around the transformative effect of technology on people’s lives often doesn’t ring true…Any leader whose company sees the global poor as a key market will find its reality-based view of the intended customers bracing and useful." - Strategy + Business

"Convincingly points out that the promises of technology itself bridging educational divides have not come true…Arora's core message is that the youth in developing countries are like their peers everywhere…Their basic motivations, however, do not differ from those of other people. The limitations they face in daily life reappear in the digital sphere." - D+C

"Payal’s findings show that the global poor use online media not just to study, find jobs, and obtain health information, but also seek pleasure, visibility, leisure, and entertainment. In the process, they negotiate issues of privacy, interaction and social tradition." - YourStory

"Extremely enlightening in regard to preconceived Western notions of the Global South and the impact of new technologies on the poor." - Choice