In this talk, I map the media world of India and its burgeoning newspapers and social media, to ask what this phenomenal media growth in the "global South" could mean for the study of global media and media policy. Based on six years of ethnographic fieldwork among journalists, news executives, audiences, and social media users in urban India, the talk presents a theoretical framework of "desire-visibility" disjunction that brings to scrutiny some of the received assumptions of media theory rooted in Western experiences. Particular focus will be on two cases: commercial journalism which became both an object and agent of global urbanization in post reforms India, and right-wing religious politics among an increasingly salient group of Twitter users. Through the window of India's media, I flag some pertinent policy implications of media growth in the South, to emphasize how attention to media field is crucial for public policy, and how, by the same token, it is important to widen the lens of media research beyond the western worlds. I discuss three concepts that take us further in this direction: context, variation and power.
Sahana Udupa is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. Her research interests center on journalism, new media, urban politics, and online religious politics. She is the author of "Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics" published by the Cambridge University Press, UK (2015). Her papers have appeared in leading journals including American Ethnologist, Media, Culture and Society, and Communication, Culture and Critique.