Mobile Popular

Aswin Punathambekar (Author) 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.

"A Mobile Popular is imaginative, comprehensive, and future-minded. Drawing from content that binds, identifies, and often disperses networked cultures, the authors offer fresh and potent insights. The book is theory and method for scholars. Above all, it is a fun and meaningful read for all audiences." – Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois, Chicago "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." - Ravi Sundaram, author of Pirate Modernity: Delhi's Media Urbanism  "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." - Ranjani Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University "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." - Gholam Khiabany, Goldsmiths, University of London