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.
eBook - ePub
A Mobile Popular
Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
- 210 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
A Mobile Popular
Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
About this book
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Critical Cultural Communication Series
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: Popular Culture and the Political in a Digital Milieu
- 1. Southern Stories: YouTube and the Boundaries of the Digital Nation
- 2. Untimely Humor: Memes, Comedy Collectives, and Mediated Populisms
- 3. Sounding Out Popular Rage: The Case of #Kolaveri Di
- 4. Sonic Authoritarianism: Influencers and Their Nationalist Listeners
- 5. Switching Off Screens: Sound Art and Escape Routes to New Public Spheres
- Conclusion: A Digital Bargain
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
- About the Authors
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Information
Publisher
NYU PressYear
2026Topic
Social SciencesPrint ISBN
9781479812998
Subtopic
Civics & CitizenshipeBook ISBN
9781479813025
Index
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Yes, you can access A Mobile Popular by Aswin Punathambekar,Sangeet Kumar,Sriram Mohan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Civics & Citizenship. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.