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

• Main Author: Mohan, Sriram
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: My University 2024
• Subjects: digital media; india; south asia; media industries; popular culture; Screen Arts and Cultures; Humanities General; South Asian Languages and Cultures; Humanities; FOS Humanities; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7302/22984; http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/193339

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 ...