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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.

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’.

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

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.

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.

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.