Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and cognate disciplines has emphasized the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having "disrupted" many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and intersectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures. AbstractOver the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having "disrupted" many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.
This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disconnection, which contrasts with the reality of a profound inequality of access to both connection and disconnection across the globe, and second, the fact that connectivity not only involves digital media users but also those who are materially not connected to the network. This introduction also reflects on the changing meanings of being connected and disconnected to digital networks and platforms at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic forces many people around the world to remain physically separated from others due to lockdown and quarantine measures.
This article analyzes the significance of linguistic and cultural regions for the global expansion and localization of digital platforms. Bringing issues of globalization and cultural difference to bear on the study of platforms, we explore the industrial and cultural logics at work when digital platforms like YouTube navigate new markets. We first map YouTube’s trajectory in India and outline how the company came to recognize and value southern India’s linguistic and cultural diversity as crucial for its national and global expansion. Through close readings of videos produced by a leading channel (Put Chutney), we then outline how ‘region’ emerges as the dominant scale for localization and examine different conceptions of the region that are mobilized to secure an online audience. More broadly, we argue that platform localization is the contingent outcome of the interaction of algorithmic and representational logics that structure the operations of digital platforms.
This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, satirical videos that took on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, and other political figures during the 2014 election campaign season offered a strikingly different and immensely popular mode of engagement with the political. Moving past well-worn paradigms for understanding the relation between entertainment and politics, this article situates online satire within a vibrant field of everyday digital media production that marks contemporary Indian public culture. I show how satirical videos became part of an intricate, networked, yet comprehensible intertextual field that linked the 2014 elections to long-standing political issues and debates around caste, class, gender and sexuality, and religious nationalism.
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