Keynote Speaker Category: Digital Equality, Diversity, Female Speakers, Technology,
PAYAL ARORA
Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Author of ‘The Next Billion Users”. In this book Payal reveals that the 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.
Topics:
- The Next Million Users
- Call to Action Towards an Inclusive Internet
- Can Mobile, Internet, and AI include the masses?
- Digital innovation for the next billion
These are just some of the topics that Payal speaks about. Contact us if you would like her to talk about a particular topic that is of interest to you.
Videos:
RHS -Who is in charge of the future of the internet? | Payal Arora | TEDxErasmusUniversity
Media:
Why digital benefits need to be balanced with data privacy – Payal Arora, author, ‘The Next Billion Users
Hitting the Books: Modern surveillance and ‘the science of happiness’
How the pursuit of leisure drives internet use
Who is in charge of the future of the internet? | Payal Arora | TEDxErasmusUniversity
BIOGRAPHY
Payal Arora is the author of several books including Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate, 2010), The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2015; Winner of the EUR Fellowship Award), and recently The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West (Harvard University Press).
Her most recent book The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West (Harvard University Press, 2019). In this book she 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. Payal reveals that many assumptions about internet use in developing countries are wrong. Through extensive fieldwork, she demonstrates that the global poor are far from virtuous utilitarian’s 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. Much of her research focuses on data governance, media literacy and digital cultures in the Global South.
Payal is the co-editor of Crossroads in New media, Identity & Law: The Shape of Diversity to Come (Palgrave, 2015) and has published 50 papers in her field and has given over 150 keynote presentations across 85 cities in 35 countries, including a TEDx talk on the future of the internet.
She has consulted for both the public and private sector including hp, Dutch Brewers, GE, and UNESCO. Her teaching has been recognised through a number of best teacher nominations and awards including the prestigious University Education Prize in 2017.
She is the Founder and Executive Director of a digital activism organization, Catalyst Lab, and is currently Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
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