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The ‘great integration’ of disparate economic sectors by ‘Big Tech’ has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of ‘platform ecosystems’. Taking the case study of India’s ‘national champion’ Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India’s leading ‘corporate’ has deployed the ‘ecosystem’ blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India’s digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner’s founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.

It does not need to be said that we live in extraordinary times. The majority of the world's population are living under some form of movement restrictions, and our daily work, sustenance and sociability have been almost entirely mediatized. As scholars of media and communication, there are critical developments in play that deserve our attention and our voice, and Media International Australia is pleased to offer this first selection of articles and commentaries from our Extraordinary Issue on Coronavirus, Crisis and Communication.

This article is intended to provoke debate around the assumed relationships between media, culture and civilization. To begin with, it considers how the concept of civilization has been framed, and periodically re-framed, in media theory by shifts in the international order of communication. In parallel with this historiography, the article revisits a body of research that explored the evolution of television audiences in alignment with the cultural geography of the world. Taking account of this transition from national media institutions to supra-national markets, and the apparent dissolution of the worldwide web into geolinguistic networks more recently, this article argues that media systems and audiences are subject to the primacy of civilizational mass in the world system. Consequently, this article draws attention to persistent anxieties around a purported crisis of civilization, and the political imperatives for cultural studies scholarship to engage with both the concept and scale of civilization.

In the complex operations of the Indian media economy, the phrase ‘media markets’ requires careful consideration as an analytical concept. As a noun, ‘media markets’ is typically used to refer to a spread of media businesses and/or consumer sectors. Closer examination reveals that there tend to be multiple markets operating simultaneously within any media business (for products, capital, labour, audience, etc.). This implies an ‘economy of markets’, transacting both across media formats and with markets situated outside of the media production process. Both ‘media exchanges’ and ‘mediated exchanges’ shape the dynamics of the inter-locking markets that constitute the Indian media economy. Thus, at the categorical level, we ask several questions: What are the boundaries of media markets? Who are the key actors? How are these transactional relationships valued? With these questions in mind, this article seeks to identify points of distinction in form and geography along with critical relationships between overlapping markets and underlying interests. We propose a topology of Indian media markets, organised via three levels, with treatment of each taking into consideration the synergistic character of media markets and how interdependency shapes functional norms, rules of exchange, and the embedding of media transactions.

At the heart of the digital economy is the willful imposition of a powerful combination of hardware and software, time and data, surveillance, prediction and behavourial control. This article argues that a central ambition of digital society has been the pursuit of an integrated commodity form. The novelty of this integrated commodity stems not only from the convergence of production and consumption but also from the subsumption of sociability itself. As a consequence, we are required to consider all social actions within digital society as being transactions enshrined within an economy of integrated markets. Our acceptance of these new commodity relations is paving the way for a ‘great integration’ of simultaneous transactions across different social domains. Borrowing from Karl Polanyi’s account of an earlier transformation, this article will propose that the prerequisites of digital society and the integrated commodity form have been established through the constitution of a series of ‘fictitious commodities’.

This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetization and an advancing ‘cashless agenda’ around the world, I situate Narendra Modi’s Digital India programme as the putative foundation for a transactional economy. Drawing upon ethnographic studies exploring the everyday experience of India’s year of living digitally, this article raises the critical question of who must, or indeed can, bear the transaction costs of this digital utopia. In conclusion, I argue that the rapid expansion of digital money situates these concerns at the heart of social and cultural, as much as economic, analysis.

This article explores inter-Asian media reception using the example of Bollywood films and the setting of Metro Manila in the Philippines. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with ...

India's official embrace of the soft power concept and the popular equation of Bollywood films with India's international image are discussed here with reference to their contemporary convergence. ...

In Janpath, a major thoroughfare at the heart of Lutyen’s New Delhi, stands a series of state-operated emporiums offering goods from across India. In a concretization of the political and economic relationships of the 1970s, the row of emporiums offering wares from specific Indian states sits across the road from the towering structure of the All India Central Cottage Industries Emporium. As reminders of the heyday of the command economy era under Indira Gandhi, Delhi’s handicraft emporiums continue to offer customers a consciously curated array of goods, enclosed within a tightly regulated space where the inefficiencies and hassles of everyday exchange are negated by the standardization of both prices and goods under the aegis of the state. They also deliver. A reminder of the rational promises of a receding era, these emporia in turn reference the retail emporiums that appeared in global metropoles at the end of the nineteenth century, heralding the era of the urban department store. Beyond its historical resonance as a grandiose sensory-retail experience, I propose that the emporium might serve us well as both a metaphor and a structural analogy for India’s emerging ‘platform economy’, through its component qualities and their attendant vectors

In this book, we begin to interrogate the phenomenon of India’s expanding platform economy in terms of both rationale and process, linking a series of empirical inquiries to a critical analysis of the prevailing logics of ‘platform capitalism’ and ‘platformization’. This approach reflects our view that platforms are market systems rather than simply technical systems and explores the consequent need to situate their evolution in India both contextually and historically. In this respect, we diverge from an understanding of platforms as novel forms of firm emerging unheralded from the affordances of data mining and mobile technologies. In developing a markets-based approach towards the platform economy, we attempt to outline the key motivating tendencies playing out across the interlocking domains of commerce, technology, sociability and logistics. In doing so, this collection of chapters seeks to establish a set of analytical markers more precisely attuned to the cultural dynamics and path dependencies shaping digital marketplaces in India.

This volume provides a critical examination of the evolution of platform economies in India. Contributions from leading media and communications scholars present case studies that illustrate the social and economic ambitions at the heart of Digital India. Across interdisciplinary domains of business, labour, politics, and culture, this book examines how digital platforms are embedding automated systems into the social fabrics of everyday life. Encouraging readers to explore the phenomenon of platformisation in context, the book uncovers the distinctive features of platform capitalism in India.

The incumbent Government of India has staked a significant stock of its political capital in the global positioning of India as both tech-savvy and open. It has made strenuous efforts since 2015 to facilitate the infrastructure necessary for realizing the vision of a “Digital India” with universal access and a fully integrated data infrastructure. For their part, global technology players have also proved receptive to the wider ambitions of Digital India because the core initiatives are clearly intended to deliver the ecosystem for a vast platform economy centered upon digital goods and services. Across the four articles included in this special issue, we have attempted to situate our analysis of India’s media platforms within the wider pursuit of a platform economy and also within the histories, structures, markets, geographies, and aesthetics of Indian audiovisual culture. In pursuing these aims, we have benefited greatly from an ongoing dialogue with valued friends and colleagues currently working on topics across the breadth of India’s platform economy. We look forward to rich and continuing discussions as we progress further into the age of platforms.

On 8 November 2016, the Government of India embarked upon one of the most radical monetary interventions in modern times. It did so by instantly demonetizing 85% of its paper cash in circulation with just a few hours of notice. The radical nature of this intervention also has to be understood in the context of an economy that has always been centred upon cash payments, relatively little of which passes through the banking sector. To pronounce a cashless future in an economy where debit cards have become predominant is one thing, but to do so in the Indian context constituted a massive leap of faith. Given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s close relationship with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the huge potentials of the Indian market for microfinance, it is hardly surprising that international commentators rushed to praise the bold vision being applied in the overnight shift to a cashless society, an agenda that is being widely promoted across much of the world. One year on, however, it has become evident that this momentous decision was an economic disaster. This chapter reflects upon India’s year of demonetization and provides a critical interrogation of the assumptions underpinning the cashless agenda.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of transactional forms of the digital across the Asian region by addressing the platforms and infrastructures that shape the digital experience. Contributors argue that each and every encounter mediated by the digital carries with it a functional exchange, but at the same time each transaction also implies an exchange based on social relationships for the digital age. In capturing the digital revolution through case studies of economic, informational, and social exchanges from across the larger Asian region, the book offers a richly contextualized and comparative account of the pervasive nature of the digital as both a medium for action and a medium of record.

This article considers the future of audience research in an era of big data. It does so by interrogating the dynamics and potentials of the big data paradigm in an era of user-generated content and commercial exploitation. In this context, it is proposed that the major dynamics of big data are a conjoint application of numerology and alchemy in the information age. On this basis, the potentials of new data techniques are addressed in light of the critical gap between audience data and the audiences themselves.

Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our respondents narrated the personal meanings that they construct around ethnically specific media, they were compelled to describe known and hypothetical others, to elucidate symbolic and moral codes, and to reveal social empathies and anxieties. In this study, we found that discussions around migrant stories revealed a series of deeply personalised notions of self and place that were always situated in juxtaposition with externalised projections of community formation and the ‘mainstream’ culture. This dynamic reflects what can be conceptualised as the central preoccupations of a ‘diasporic social imagination’. These responses, therefore, constitute a case study of social imagination at work in a multicultural context, underlining the utility of narrative media in providing a public forum for discussing cultural diversity.

In the decades following Indian Independence, the exponential growth of urban populations, the encroachment of slums on all open lands, the expensive and exhaustive hurdles to commercial premises and the chronic shortage of leisure capacity in overcrowded Indian cities all contributed to a delivery mechanism that operated on the street. Even during the heady days of India's ‘liberalisation’ economy at the end of the millennium, India's media revolution – notwithstanding its global interface with content and technology – was essentially a street economy. Its commercial aesthetics were embedded within the particular spaces of video parlors, pavement stalls and the unique self-regulating confines of India's residential colonies. As such, the public encounter with media technologies was marked by appropriation, informality and opportunistic mobility, and it was firmly embedded in local relationships of exchange. Over the past decade, however, an emerging corporate leisure economy has sought to implement a very different social architecture. Its commercial strategy is overwhelmingly determined by the notion of an ‘aspirational’ middle class, ‘unfettered’ by liberalisation. Its public domain has been materialised in the new infrastructure of shopping malls and multiplexes designed to physically distance consumers from the ‘Third World’ media economy of the recent past. At the same time, the explicit alignment of this emerging corporate leisure economy with the ‘consuming classes' undermines its substitution for more inclusive localised domains served by the pirate public sphere. This article argues that attempts to relocate media consumption within the formal economy and the strictures of ‘international’ architecture necessarily illustrate the ongoing tensions between two distinctive and incompatible public spheres.

The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledge of transnational audiences remains highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptual or comparative framework. In the main, overarching theories of global media flows and markets continue to rest upon theoretical understandings of media reception that are largely derived from a previous epoch where media mobility and intercultural communication was not a primary focus. As a consequence, contemporary studies of transnational media reception still require a coherent geography capable of addressing the unique demands of this kind of work. There is a pressing need, th...

While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger “consuming class” spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying suburban and satellite townships in what were until recently brown and greenfield sites. Exclusive leisure facilities such as the multiplex illustrate the growing socio-spatial segregation in Indian cities, and suggest the ways the consuming classes are transforming urban space in their own image. As such, while the significance of the multiplex to cultural perspectives in the “New India” is widely noted, they also illustrate much broader issues of the political economy of India that are almost never discussed in the same breath as cinema, including taxati...

The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within shopping mall developments and other new forms of privatized ‘public’ leisure. As such, the multiplex has powerfully altered the nature of cinema as public space and thus, crucially, what it means to be in the cinema hall. While the reconstitution of the cinema crowd within the multiplex might be seen as constitutive of the ‘globalizing’ trends now at work in Indian cities, this article seeks to demonstrate that the particular dynamics of the Indian multiplex at the present time must also be understood within the historical trajectory of the Indian cinema hall an...

The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in particular, to the contemporary dynamics of the media economy. The rise of the multiplex is closely related to the re-organisation of working practices and of capital investment within the film exhibition sector. The aggregation of interests within what has traditionally been a highly fragmented industry with largely informal organisation is a result of both the entry of outside concerns into the theatrical market and of operational change within the industry itself as leading players pursue an agenda of ‘corporatisation’. It is these new corporate entities, funde...

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

In recent years, Indian media producers have increased their efforts to combat the effects of piracy on their export earnings. They are facing a number of challenges, many of which can be traced to the particular nature of the Indian film industry itself and the idiosyncratic development of its political-economy over the past six decades. This article explores the dynamics of Indian media piracy and, in doing so, makes the case that Indian cinema could not have attained its considerable global standing without the distributive networks constructed around media piracy. This article also seeks to correlate the prevalence of media piracy with the murky world of Indian film finance. Finally, the article looks to the future in the guise of corporatization within the Indian film industry, the synchronization of intellectual property regimes and the pursuit of market control by means of the anti-piracy drive now being pursued in certain key export territories.

I can't keep it inside my head anymore! All this preaching by the Western media about what I should appreciate from my own popular culture. One Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) comes alon...

One of the central tenets of economic and political thinking in the Anglophone countries during the recent phase of globalisation has been the inevitability of a permanent shift away from manufacturing as the central plank of the economy in favour of a new scenario where technical innovation, creative performance and information management are the main sources of activity. A modernist worldview typical of the 1950s would likely characterise this as a process of ‘undevelopment’. In a changing world, however, we might elect to see the de-industrialisation of the West as a necessary rebalancing of the uneven development of the colonial era. More commonly, however, the notion of a ‘post-industrial’ society has been postulated not as a lapse into a pre-industrial epoch or a lasting redistribution of productive wealth, but rather as marking a paradigm shift into a new stage of post-modern social and economic development (Bell 1973; Masuda 1980; Kumar 2005). By this reading, the most developed countries are deemed as having passed through certain stages in economic and social organisation (namely, agricultural society and industrial society) prior to the pursuit of a post-industrial society. This teleology naturally causes us to question the implications of this new paradigm for a country like India, which has invested so much in industrialisation as the ultimate goal of the development process.

The aim of this article is to introduce the phenomenon of the multiplex theatre as it is being played out within the complex urban geographies of metropolitan India. Since its inception a decade ago, the multiplex cinema in the subcontinent has become an intrinsic component of a new leisure infrastructure configured around the notion of a ‘consuming class’ keen to take its place amongst a ‘global middle class’. The dramatic growth in multiplex cinemas, projected to grow in numbers by 300 per cent over the next three years, has been greatly encouraged by urban planning and taxation policies designed to encourage new commercial and residential developments arising out of urban regeneration programmes and the growth of satellite conurbations. This article makes the case that, while the multiplex is an example of flagship architecture employed in the ‘globalisation ‘of the urban environment, the demand for such facilities is also a logical extension of the long-running contest over public spaces between different segments of the urban population in Indian cities.

This article seeks to examine the ongoing struggle between narrowcast media piracy practices serving migrant communities and the attempts currently being made by players in the Indian film industry to legitimate, and thus capitalise on, the circulation of Indian films in key offshore markets. This article poses the question of whether an alternative network of distribution is likely to emerge which might supplant Asian food stores as the primary distribution network for Indian films, and to place this problem within the existing framework of cultural practices surrounding Indian films in Australia.

This article draws on a body of interviews conducted during 2003–04 with movie‐viewers, distributors and exhibitors of Indian movies in Australia, primarily in the Sydney region of New South Wales. My immediate concern is with the manner in which Indian movies reach an audience in Australia and how that audience is described, both by themselves and by those who seek to cater to them. The wider context of this study is its contribution to a transnational perspective on Indian movies and the cultural understandings that they generate within and across specific localities. As such, this article attempts to reformulate the conception of media‐communities by replacing an ethnographic model with an emphasis on surveying the diverse inhabitants of a ‘cultural field’ constructed around the Indian movie.

Television studies must now address a complex environment where change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly. Globalizing media industries, deregulatory policy regimes, the multiplication, convergence and trade in media formats, the emergence of new content production industries outside the US/UK umbrella, and the fragmentation of media audiences are all changing the nature of television today: its content, its industrial structure and how it is consumed. Television Studies after TV leads the way in developing new ways of understanding television in the post-broadcast era. With contributions from leading international scholars, it considers the full range of convergent media now implicated in understanding television, and also focuses on large non-Anglophone markets - such as Asia and Latin America - in order to accurately reflect the wide variety of structures, forms and content which now organise television around the world.

This article will consider in detail the implications of a diffuse social imagination for existing paradigms of ethnographic audience research. The notion of a 'cultural field research model will be offered here as an alternative structure for locating media communities as sites of social practice. This is a theoretical framework that reformulates the conception of media audiences as 'imagined communities by replacing a demographically constituted ethnographic model with an emphasis on surveying the diverse inhabitants of a cultural field constructed around participation in particular instances of media practice.