FellowSpeak: "The Digital Popular: Media, Culture and Politics in Networked India"

U-M Associate Professor of Communication Studies and 2018-19 Steelcase Faculty Fellow Aswin Punathambekar gives a 30-minute talk followed by Q & A.

U-M Associate Professor of Communication Studies and 2019 Steelcase Faculty Fellow Aswin Punathambekar explores political salience of popular culture in the context of rise of digital media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media use in contemporary India. In a context where cassette culture, color television, VCRs, cable and satellite broadcasting, the internet, and mobile phones all arrived within a span of two decades, digital media platforms are layered onto existing media infrastructures, institutions, and the intensely mediated routines of daily life for hundreds of millions of people. The result is the emergence of a hybrid arena defined by 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 other hand, social media companies defined by emergent logics of data-driven programming and production, algorithmic curation, and user participation. As part of an ongoing project on mediated political cultures, this talk will address how these media dynamics have transformed links between popular culture and politics and, in the process, reconfigured the meanings and performances of citizenship in contemporary India.