Media and mediated popular cultures in India

Abstract

We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street – not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks. The new century has brought a whole host of new technological artefacts within hand’s reach of all but the poorest denizens of the city street – the cell phone, the iPad, and attendant applications that help us navigate the city and connect and network cyber and physical spaces. These technologies are creating new cultures, material and aesthetic, cyber and physical space-making of new kinds that do not simply alter older traditions but transmogrify them into new shapes and flows. Older forms of social theorization of structure-agency, objectivity-subjectivity, human being and technological artifice are in turn being rethought afresh in new material contexts, even as we have yet to absorb what the dominant media technologies of the past century – the book, the photograph, the neon sign, television and cinema – mean for understanding human society. In recent issues, Thesis Eleven has been exploring these themes of the ways our new, globalized technological social worlds are mediating our social worlds and annihilating time. Peter Murphy and others explored a post-discursive social theory of knowledge in Issue 89: ‘Medium Theory and Social Knowledge’ (2007). As Murphy himself states: ‘The key insight of medium theory is that linguistic acts (signs, symbols, codes, grammars, justifications, writings, and so on) are only a tiny aspect of the way in which