{"product_id":"a-mobile-popular-9781479813025","title":"A Mobile Popular","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eExplores the entanglement of digital media, popular culture, and political expression in contemporary India.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Mobile Popular\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSet against the rise of Hindu nationalism, the expansion of platform capitalism, and the emergence of a global right-wing technoculture, \u003ci\u003eA Mobile Popular \u003c\/i\u003ereveals 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough 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, \u003ci\u003eA Mobile Popular\u003c\/i\u003e illuminates the far-reaching implications of digitalization for culture, communication, and politics today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Aswin Punathambekar","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48092025946363,"sku":"9781479813025","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/unnamed_99008f14-9b25-4867-92ce-e8cebaed4414.jpg?v=1779491664","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/a-mobile-popular-9781479813025","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}