The Time of Television: Broadcasting, Daily Life, and the New Indian Middle Class

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138335/1/cccr12164.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138335/2/cccr12164_am.pd

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption

From IndiaFM.com to Radio Ceylon: New media and the making of the Bombay film industry

Prior studies of the Bombay film industry have focused on film in isolation, despite broadcasting and digital media shaping the circulation and reception of films and film music in fundamental ways. Through a case study of Indiafm.com, this article analyzes the role played by dot-com companies in the film industry’s construction of an overseas market over the past decade. It also highlights the importance of examining how other ‘new media’ technologies and institutions – radio, state-regulated television (Doordarshan), VCRs and the video business, cable and satellite television – have shaped the cultural geography of Hindi cinema and Bombay’s status as a media capital at different historical conjunctures.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65061/1/Punathambekar_IndiaFM_MCS.pd

We are like this only : Desis and Hindi films in the Diaspora

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-102).Set in Boston, U.S.A, the overarching goal of this thesis is to develop a theoretical framework and a set of analytical tools that might help us understand how Hindi films are watched in the Indian- American diaspora and what viewers, situated in particular historical, socio-political contexts, bring to bear upon their engagement with these films. In spite of the sheer number of Hindi films released each year (150-200) and the increasing importance of audiences in countries such as the U.S., we know little, if anything, about audience motivations, viewing practices and consumption patterns. Suggesting we take the familiar seriously, this project's primary goal is to serve as an inaugural act that will map key coordinates of the space that Hindi cinema and its transnational audience occupies. This research project is designed to examine viewing practices and interpretations of Hindi films among a small sample of ten Indian immigrant families drawn from two different social positions - (a) the educated, professional and affluent class (doctors, scientists, software professionals, consultants, etc.), and (b) less educated, working class (owners and employees of grocery & convenience stores, gas stations, motels & restaurants, etc.). Given the complexity of the issue of class in general, and especially its intersections with caste, religion, and other variables in the Indian context, the findings in this study will be treated not so much as a class-based comparison of reception, but instead as an attempt to situate reception in a social and historical context that is marked by profound differences in access to privilege at the local, national and transnational levels. In addition, operating with the family as the research site allows this comparative frame to investigate similarities and differences based on gender and generation. Drawing on the tradition of using ethnographic techniques to analyze media reception (in this case, participant-observation and in-depth interviews), this project hopes to establish popular culture as a crucial site for exploring how identities are communicatively constituted in the Indian diaspora. Arguing that cinema viewing constitutes one of the most culturally visible arenas of activity in the Indian diaspora, a topic that is just beginning to attract scholarly attention, this project's larger goal is to serve as a starting point for larger debates and contests over several contentious issues that reveal anxieties of Indian immigrants from diverse social positions.by Aswin Punathambekar.S.M

A Conversation

A conversation about an essay on future South Asia in Seminar 632, April 201

A Conversation

A conversation about an essay on future South Asia in Seminar 632, April 201

Digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having “disrupted” many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures

On the ordinariness of participatory culture

Amit Paul's participation in Indian Idol 3 created chances for interaction across longstanding ethnic, religious, spatial, and linguistic barriers in Meghalaya

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption