have in common what if I told you that
not only are they both deeply connected
but together they could reveal the
future of the Internet quite a bit of a
leap here so stay with me on this what
do we know about the poor and the
digital life today we know that three
billion people about half the world’s
population live in $2 a day
we know that majority of them are young
and live outside the West and are fast
getting online thanks to the mobile
phone in fact there are just as many
mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria and
South Africa as there are in the United
States there are most cell phones than
people in China and if you look at a
list of the top countries of the most
Facebook users you will see India and
Brazil ranked number 2 and 3 on that
list evidently this has excited
development agencies by far at last they
say the Internet can help end poverty as
you know it so they’re calling upon
innovators of all stripes to build
applications to enable the poor to
access all kinds of public services from
health care to education sounds like a
great plan right so how’s it going so
far
so I researched the internet and
developing countries so let me tell you
first about a one of my first projects
that I was involved with more than a
decade ago it was in the small town in
the south of India it was an ambitious
project the idea was to infuse the town
with all kinds of new technologies so
the poor could leapfrog their way out of
poverty so what was done kiosks were set
up everywhere like ATMs of information
the vision was that women would check
health information farmers could check
crop prices and kids could learn words
of English through these kiosks vans
were sent out to remote villages
just spread the joys of the internet and
cyber cafes are set up for more tedious
tasks like downloading government forms
and searching for jobs right so couple
months went by and we started hear
rumors about the project people really
liked it but not for the reasons we
imagined the kiosks became gaming
stations the vans came to be known as
movie vans because they would show free
movies to all the villagers to get their
attention and the cyber cafes came to be
known as friendship cafes the cafe
owners they swore by social networking
sites like orchid the Facebook of the
day because it kept their businesses
alive so what’s the takeaway here it’s
obviously that the poor are more like
you and me than we imagined in fact
since then every single project I’ve
been on has yielded similar results
browsing statistics today confirm the
fact that whether you’re from Boston all
from a favela in Brazil the most popular
and most frequented sites are social
networking sites gaming sites and
pornography sites so why do we continue
holding on to this myth that somehow the
poem o virtuous online in us three
reasons for this the first is that
leisure is not fundable what do I mean
by that
let me explain so there’s this
healthcare project launched a couple of
years ago in South Asia the game mobile
phones to farmers the idea was that they
would send health updates through text
messages so the project came to an end
and it was time to write up the report
and the data scientists found something
astonishing what they found was that the
majority of the data was diverted to one
task and one task only pornography
so imagine you writing up that report it
would be hard for you to sort of
convince the funders to sponsor
pornography for the poor right so what
did they do well they fudged a little
and they focused on the under health
care part thereby perpetuating this
fiction that the poor are more utility
driven than passion driven the second
reason is that we have come to believe
that the poor have to go through a
social evolution before they can even
think about leisure why well thanks to
this theory called hierarchy of needs it
was a theory that came about in the
1940s and even though thoroughly
debunked today it continues to hold a
tremendous influence on our thinking so
it basically goes like this that the
poor first had to satisfy the physical
needs of food and shelter before they
can go into this psychological needs and
eventually they can focus on
self-actualization so in other words
it’s like me telling you that you can’t
possibly think of something fun or
something profound like world peace of
freedom until and unless your stomach is
full
obviously Gandhi and the life did not
get that memo
so the third reason is that leisure is
seen as dangerous history is a great
guide here in the industrial era leisure
in the hands of the rich was seen as a
sign of culture in the hands of the poor
it was an instrument of trouble so
basically the idea was to get the poor
to labor as much and leisure as less so
they would have less time to think and
act upon this tremendous social
inequality they live with it is no
wonder that it took more than a century
for the poor to gain access to a public
park or even the right to a weekend so
what do we do about this well we can
start by first acknowledge
that the poor have the right to leisure
like everyone else also funders should
keep funding but if they remotely
serious and using the Internet to
empower the poor they need to first
motivate the poor to adopting these new
technologies and leisure is the key
gateway to the Internet
look I don’t want you to attend to the
poor because you have to I want you to
attend to the pool because you want to
and trust me you want to we all love the
Internet here and what is the Internet
really but the culmination of the
collective imagination and creativity of
the users and that’s just half the
world’s population now imagine now
imagine opening the door to the other
half the next three billion who are
getting online right now think about
that for a moment by letting the other
half in we would be doubling the
possibilities for the future of the
Internet thank you [Applause]
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