Inhabiting a Digital Dystopia?
Kiran V. Bhatia · 2024
This chapter concludes that popular narratives sometimes identify poor children as vulnerable groups who need help and protection to negotiate contemporary caste, class, gender, and religious inequities. Simultaneously, these children are labelled lazy—deviants who use hard-won access to digital technologies for entertainment, socialising, and other nonproductive purposes. This messiness in the popular narratives describing children’s digital engagements in the three low-income urban settlements is convenient for governments, corporations, and the market-driven society. Such notional messiness allows the macro institutions of power in the country to reduce poor children into a market segment driven by the neoliberal and profit logic. This chapter provides a glimpse into the existing state of digital dystopia in the urban sprawls of India.