The Wall Street Journal [WSJ] of 8th August 2017 features Megh Singh , a smart phone user from Delhi , India. Megh Singh, 36, is a coolie porter in New Delhi Railway station. He does not read English and is not comfortable to use a keyboard. That does not stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies on his smart phone. He sits either in the Railway station’s stairwell or at times on the door steps of a stationary train ,whispers into his phone using speech recognition on the station’s free Wi Fi using a Sony Smartphone with 4 GB storage .On his phone are some of the popular apps -Google Search ,Facebook,WhatsApp and in addition the Chinese UC Browser and MX Player.
India has one of the largest population of mobile phones- more than 900 million and counting [ much more than toilets, some statistics state] and more than 30 percent are Smart phones like the one with Megh Singh , mostly with Android operating system. One need not be Internet Savvy in the conventional sense to use such phones. This new paradigm is transcending the traditional package needed to attract the “second billion ” users of the Internet as per a spokesperson from Google. The beauty of this new trend is that it is independent of any language and relies heavily on the visual and auditory sensation in human beings . Tim Cook ,Please Note !
[ See the feature ‘ Internet’s Next Users:More Video,Less Typing contributed by Karan Deep Singh in WSJ dated 8th Aug 2017]