“Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context

Abstract

In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world’s second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of “millennial India.” Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of “millennials” who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have led to a democratization of public participation through the self-activity of online users. Qualifying the assumption that participation leads to empowerment, we show that a politics of civic action has grown simultaneously with violent exclusions via digital circulation. Millennial India emphasizes the need to take a contextual approach to global digital politics, and recognizes the continuities in the structures of political action in as much as the disruptions engendered by digital infrastructures.

Whose agenda is it anyway: an exploration of cancel culture and political affiliation in the United States

“…Although the content of their message is hateful, expressing anger or fear toward a person or persons, digital vigilantes believe they have the moral high ground (Chiou 2020;Favarel-Garrigues et al 2020). When these vigilantes attract a mob to join in their actions (e.g., Udupa et al 2020), this form of digital hate can become cancel culture.…”

“…All of these terms can be connected back to digital vigilantism: grassroots movements aimed at perceived justice (Dunsby and Howes 2019;Favarel-Garrigues et al 2020;Loveluck 2020). Unlike digital vigilantism, however, which can involve a single vigilante or a mob (Udupa et al 2020), one cannot cancel alone; evidence would suggest it takes a mob to cancel or deplatform a public figure (Beer 2020;Bluestone 2017;Dodgson 2020;Frazer-Carroll 2020). In addition, while digital vigilantism is associated with bypassing censorship by making private information public (Huang 2021;Trottier 2020), cancel culture is actually seen as a form of contemporary censorship (Tufekci 2018) coming from social networks (Herzog 2018).…”

“…This is beyond the scope of the present work, but studies performing global analyses on cancel culture in politics should take these alternative politicians into account as well. This study also specifically targeted the United States because of its particularly polarized two-party political system (Hetherington and Weiler 2009), but cancel culture exists all around the world (e.g., Huang 2021;Italie 2020;Mortimer 2020;Sonder 2019;Udupa et al 2020), including in countries without two-party political systems. Future work should examine cancel culture in these other cultural contexts to see which variables hold up as predictors and which do not function outside of the United States context.…”

Religious Subjectivities and Digital Collectivities on Social Networking Sites in India

“…Let us take the example of rumours related to the phenomenon of ‘love-Jihad’ circulated through the SNS. According to scholars such as Siddiqui (2018) and Udupa et al (2020), rumours designed to initiate communal conflicts imbibe the technical affordance of immediacy within the content curated and have the potential to translate into situations of conflict which escalate easily. Cody (2019) also emphasizes that these instances of organized hatred have relied heavily on the infrastructural affordances of SNS.…”

The Media (Studies) of the Pandemic Moment: Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Issue

“…As Lisa Parks notes in this special issue, our objects of study have always “transformed, mutated and proliferated.” Yet media studies’ most compelling explanations are those that often trace the historical lineages, systemic features, and local roots of current trends or zeitgeisty concepts. For instance, recent discussions of post-truth and populist politics in political science and philosophy (McIntyre 2018) have been undoubtedly enriched by challenging contributions from perspectives in journalism history (Zelizer 2018), global media studies (Harsin 2015), television studies (Ouellette 2016), and media anthropology (Udupa et al 2020).…”