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Explores the entanglement of digital media, popular culture, and political expression in contemporary India.
A Mobile Popular offers a landmark account of how popular culture and political expression have become deeply intertwined in India's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with content creators, platform executives, and digital activists across southern India, Aswin Punathambekar, Sangeet Kumar, and Sriram Mohan theorize the “mobile popular” as a dynamic mediascape shaped by data-driven platforms, entrenched representational politics, and everyday vernacular creativity. Exploring the intersection of legacy media industries, global platforms, and multilingual digital practices, they trace how entertainment and political culture now circulate through volatile, algorithmically saturated channels.
Set against the rise of Hindu nationalism, the expansion of platform capitalism, and the emergence of a global right-wing technoculture, A Mobile Popular reveals how memes, parodies, podcasts, and other digital artifacts generate new temporal experiences, publics, and infrastructures whose political valence cannot be contained within frames of freedom and capture. Rather than valorizing digital democracy or lamenting authoritarian capture, the authors show that digital India is a plural, affectively charged arena where mobile publics continually cohere, fragment, and morph into new collectivities.
Through richly detailed case studies—from Tamil YouTube satire to activist meme cultures to sonic experiments that unsettle the temporal rhythms of Indian television—the book demonstrates how digital media have reshaped cultural belonging and redefined the meanings and performances of citizenship. Essential for students, scholars, and practitioners, A Mobile Popular illuminates the far-reaching implications of digitalization for culture, communication, and politics today.
A Mobile Popular is a refreshing and much-needed corrective to the doomsday predictions of life-worlds completely pulverised by the domination of social media platforms. As the authors point out, the unstoppable right-wing populist upsurge on internet platforms cannot prevent unanticipated ludic interruptions of the powerful. Provisional, guerrilla practices persist in the interstices of platform infrastructure, postponing announcements of a digital apocalypse. Along with terror, intimidation, and media saturation on internet platforms in India, there is laughter, surprise, and repair.
Reframing existing debates about media circulation, political affect, and network cultures, A Mobile Popular offers an impressive array of insights into India’s contemporary media assemblage. Neither romantic nor pessimistic, this book offers a sensory engagement with the shifting ecology of the digital every day where play, humor, devotion, and digital hate jostle against each other, illustrating how these contradictory elements influence user experiences and societal interactions in the digital age.
A Mobile Popular is breathtakingly an ambitious book , both in scope of exploring the dynamics and complexities of digital media, and its empirical ambition, engaging with realities of information economy and public culture in India in India. Written by three distinguished and critical analysists of global media, this gift of a book is a refreshing and original assessment of the blurring boundaries between news and entertainment at the time in which the early promises of social media is broken under the heavy weight of giant platforms, rapidly reified media ecosystem and state-sponsored biometric projects that are legitimizing and sustaining a deeply exclusionary Hindu nation.
Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC). He has written and co-edited books including From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, Global Bollywood, Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, Television at Large in South Asia, and Media Industry Studies (with Amanda Lotz and Daniel Herbert).
Sangeet Kumar (Author)
Sangeet Kumar is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Director of International Studies at Denison University. He is the author of The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (forthcoming, May 2021).
Sriram Mohan (Author)
Sriram Mohan is an independent researcher of digital media platforms and cultures in South Asia.