In this interview, Professor Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West (Harvard University Press, 2019) and From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press, 2024), sits down with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg to explore the impact of the “next billion users” on language diversity in the digital sphere. This wide-ranging conversation touches upon the role of youth in cultivating the vitality of minoritized languages in digital spaces, how aspirations impact language choices, how voice technologies shift power dynamics for digitally disadvantaged languages, and the “hidden” use of diverse languages beyond digital spaces researchers can access. The discussion also examines the ways in which language, metaphor and visual communication are leveraged, particularly by women, to navigate their personal freedom within highly surveilled digital spaces. The purity politics of language is addressed, including hybrid languages, online slang, emoji and the art of virality through fresh and flexible communication. Arora also dissects tech companies’ newfound concentration on “the next billion users”, and proposes that a consumer-focused approach to the Global South honours communities’ desire for quality services and is an effective route to serving their linguistic, cultural and social interests. Citing global solidarity, Arora rejects the idea that ethnographers are unable to authentically represent other cultures. Rather, she advises them to engage research participants as co-collaborators to avoid extractive patterns of knowledge development, while mapping the unique relations between the global and the local across humanity’s diverse contexts.
Arora et al. (Thu,) studied this question.