The Digital Popular: Media Entertainment and Cultural Politics in Contemporary India ...

This dissertation explores the intersections between burgeoning digital media practices and everyday cultural politics in India over the course of a decade (2010 – 2020). Based on close readings of English, Hindi and Tamil-language media texts, analysis of a range of industry and trade documents, an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mohan, Sriram
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: My University 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.7302/22984
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/193339
Description
Summary:This dissertation explores the intersections between burgeoning digital media practices and everyday cultural politics in India over the course of a decade (2010 – 2020). Based on close readings of English, Hindi and Tamil-language media texts, analysis of a range of industry and trade documents, and participant observation in Indian media capitals, I move past conceptions of internet cultures as flowing from North Atlantic media and tech capitals to the ‘newly digital’ spaces of the Global South. Charting how Indian digital media productions, ranging from memes and satirical videos on YouTube to catchy songs redeployed to make political claims, constitute and configure popular politics, I argue that the digital popular is a polyphonic mediascape defined by combustible and unpredictable interactions between two distinct zones of public culture – on the one hand, powerful film and television industries that are shaped primarily by logics of scale, audience niches, and a politics of representation, and on the ...