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Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray eds., "Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader" (NYU Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Pete Kunze
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guests today are Aswin Punathembakar, Adrian Shaw, and Jonathan Gray, editors of Planet Digital A Global Media Cultures Reader. The book was published by New York University Press in 2026. Good afternoon, everyone. How are you doing today?
- [00:53]
Jonathan Gray
Great. Thanks for having us. Pete.
- [00:55]
Aswin Punathembakar
Yeah, great to be here.
- [00:57]
Pete Kunze
The pleasure is mine. Before we dive in, I was hoping that each of you could introduce yourselves and tell listeners a bit about your research and background. And maybe we can start with Aswin on this.
- [01:07]
Aswin Punathembakar
Yeah, I'm Aswin Pune Tahnbeker. I teach at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and my research falls squarely in what we might call global media studies. And within that broad terrain, I look at how media industries operate and how they produce ideas of race, nation, and citizenship in a range of contexts. But in South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, in the UK and in the United States, I also focus a little bit of my work on the intersections of popular culture and politics, broadly construed.
- [01:43]
Adrian Shaw
Adrian yeah, I'm Adrian Shah. I teach at Temple University in the Klein College of Media and Communication, and my primary area of research is in video game studies. But approaching video game studies from a media and cultural studies perspective, largely focused on LGBTQ representation in games for the last decade or so, but broadly concerned with questions of representation in media and especially digital media cultures more broadly.
- [02:09]
Jonathan Gray
And Jonathan yeah, hi, I'm Jonathan Gray. I teach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I guess my research interests really start with the idea that I really like thinking about audiences and about textuality and how those two forces sort of come into interaction with each other and what happens when they interact with each other. I've always taught a whole bunch of other things too, though, because I can't keep my mind on one topic. And so there's lots of things I like.
- [02:39]
Pete Kunze
Excellent. And Planet Digital serves as kind of a culmination of years of teamwork between the Three of you on the Critical Communication Study series at NYU Press. Can you talk more about that experience and what brought you all to this project as kind of your finale? Ultimo.
- [02:58]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, so we have been working together for a long time now. We're stepping down as editors. But Aswan and I have done this for about 12 years together. And then Adrian's on almost nine years on the project. And it was a lot of great fun. And one of the cool things when you edit a series is you get to think about what you want more of in the field. And some of the things we looked at is critical race studies. But another key thing that we've always wanted more of is interaction with global media studies, where it's not just us and the rest. And so we see that in a bunch of our books. But then that really came to a head here where we just I this sort of led into the book project as we started to think about how there wasn't really a book that worked in classes that really took the global era into the digital era, or the digital era into the global, or however you want to, whichever one of those you want to fit into the other one. And one of the things that we had tried to do as editors was think about edited collections that really were field setting and that sort of moved things forward. And so we set ourselves the goal of. I think we had discussions about could someone else do this? And they were like, actually, how about we do it? It sounds like fun. And so that's how it began, I believe.
- [04:30]
Aswin Punathembakar
I think that captures it well. And with this particular anthology, as we began talking about what shape it would take, we very quickly recognized that as digital studies was becoming entrenched in various academic sort of contexts, we couldn't help shake off the feeling that some of the same sort of tendencies of the past were being replicated. That the sort of first in Silicon Valley and then in the rest of the world kind of academic logic, and while in fact, for instance ideas of cultural imperialism being recast in the form of platform capitalism and so on, which were helpful frameworks to be sure, but especially given how much of our digital infrastructure and platform development have actually happened in the so called rest of the world, where Silicon Valley is far from being the center of it all, really pushed us to think about, okay, how do we put the digital and the global in one framework and unsettle some of these unfortunate tendencies that our field tends to replicate every generation or so?
- [05:34]
Adrian Shaw
Yeah, and I'll add one of the other things that we had Noticed both in manuscripts we received, but especially in edited collections that talk about either digital culture or global culture is they all tend to do super deep hyper theory very quickly. And we all teach undergrads and we, we felt like we really needed something that could give students, like a bare bones introduction to these ideas before you start making them super complicated like it is. It is. I think one of the things I really like about our collection is that we really force the authors to introduce the topics that we've all sort of taken for granted that exist in global digital culture and explain it to students who might not have heard of this before, who don't know the history of studying, for example, anime or K Pop. They might know it themselves, they might experience it themselves, but they don't know the history of it. And understanding what digital technologies did to these platforms or these genres, whatever you want to call them, understands, requires understanding some of that broader history. And not again, because we're teachers. Not an entire book. Can you do it in 4,000 words? Can you give them the bare bones introduction so that we can start to have the conversations that get to that nuance that the books we'd seen in the market were doing, but need to back up a little bit for our students?
- [07:00]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I think this is something as professors, we often struggle with, which is we want to introduce our students to a contemporary concept, but we don't have time to give them all the context that is leading to this cutting edge article in the field.
- [07:13]
Adrian Shaw
Right.
- [07:13]
Pete Kunze
So it's like, yes, we want you to study so and so, but you know, you have to understand this about the feminist framework, or you have to understand this about debates and global media studies and communication over the last 20 years. And the way that this collection is balancing the macro and micro for the lack of a better way of framing it, I think is really exciting. I'm going to ask you a ridiculous question now, because that's the power of the interviewer. But as you were kind of thinking about what this collection would do, what were some of the major forces, moments, trends, processes in global and digital media studies that you were like, okay, this is what this has to get to, Right. Aswan, you gestured towards it a bit with platform capitalism, but were there other ways in which you kind of enumerated, okay, here's what's happening politically, socially, economically, and then culturally, of course, and then kind of went from there in terms of organizing the collection.
- [08:10]
Adrian Shaw
I mean, I will speak to our intro first rather than the collection as a whole. But in the intro, one of the things that we sat down and did is like, what are all the big historical events that have happened in the last 20, 30 years that we always find ourselves having to explain to students? So, for example, most of my students now were born multiple years after 9 11. They have no idea what 911 as a historical moment meant in terms of surveillance technologies, rights in the United States, the proliferating effects of the global war on terror that lasted their entire lifetime by the time they get to college. The dot com burst. There was Internet in the 90s is something I still have to explain to my 20something niece and her boyfriend. The Internet wasn't invented in the 2000s that there were parts of. Like all of these companies that are now everyday names and platforms that they use on a regular basis existed for a decade before they're thinking about them as being particularly important or relevant. And so I think. And the 2008 financial crisis, which is now nearly two decades old, like, was a big shaper in global culture, but is not something that they're taught about because it's too recent. Like one of the things I think about when I teach is how many things are too recent to be history. So they didn't learn it in high school and it's not covered in a lot of their basic classes, but so old that they don't have a reference point for it. So how do I explain the last 30 years quickly and efficiently so that I can talk about this thing that is actually the focus of the class? And so we tried to do that in the intro of, like, set through some of those big picture things. Like we can't explain all of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism in an easy to access chapter, but we can explain some of the breadcrumbs of neoliberalism that fed into the broader trends that the chapters in the book were speaking to.
- [10:07]
Aswin Punathembakar
Yeah, I'll echo that and say that one of the things we all struggle with in the classroom, of course, is how much and in what way to offer historical context for a particular object you're talking about in the class. Right. And so we had to sort of be careful about that in the introduction and also tell our authors to do that kind of historicization. Right. That classic cultural studies phrase always historicize, not to provide exhaustive history, but to sort of frame it in such a way that we say what may have led up to this object taking the shape it does at this particular moment in time. That's what we meant when we tried to say historicize. So in Addition to, you know, talking through very briefly the aftereffects of 911 and the war on terror, the financial crisis and how that sets the stage for a certain kind of financialization, media industries and then the knock on effects that has for the platform economy was one way in which we began to say if we wanted to take these really dense, really crucial frameworks of things like a new kind of platform led imperialism or a new kind of platform capitalism, then we needed to at least get students to appreciate how much of the foundation laid through the 1990s that that era of market led globalization, the crazy kind of expansion of satellite television and early Internet culture. And crucially for us, especially given the object oriented kind of approach we take in the chapters with all of our authors laying the groundworks of saying here's when cities like Seoul and Lagos and Istanbul and Mumbai really come into prominence. And that for the waning of US cultural hegemony is not a recent Trump era phenomenon. This has deep 30, 40 year roots. And here's the broad sort of world historical sketch to keep in our minds before we get to things like Squid Game or Twitch or any of the other sorts of objects that are part of our students lives today.
- [12:11]
Pete Kunze
In that spirit, I was hoping we could talk about where you open the collection, which is with Sai's Gangnam Style. And how does that music video, not just the production of it, but its circulation and its resonances, help to set the stage for the themes that Planet Digital is hoping to parse out for readers?
- [12:32]
Adrian Shaw
Yeah, I'll take that one because that was actually an example that I'd used in a class called Technology and Culture for like the last decade as a way of the goal of Technology and Culture is to take a cultural studies approach to the impacts of technology through a variety of different like cultural studies lenses. So we do platforms, political economy, pop culture studies, historical studies, right? Like we're trying to understand the various ways we can understand the relationship between this thing we call technology and this thing we call culture without assuming a sort of technology always impacts culture, culture always creates technology. To understand them more is like a loop, loop. And one of the things that I use Sai's Gangnam Style for, at least I used to, it's now kind of too old. An example to use for students in that specific class is to merge this discussion of pop culture and virality and meme culture to our understanding of platforms and algorithms. And one of the things that I like about that example is, you know, Sai's Gangnam Style video was like One of the biggest, most watched viral videos on YouTube in 2012, it quickly racked up a billion views when There are only 2 billion Internet users worldwide, right? Made tons of money. Became part of the story that a lot of my students told themselves about how you can get rich on the Internet is by going viral. So it's part of like a concept of what pop culture looks like in the digital age. But one of the things that happened is the success of that video and other videos at the same time. It's not just that video is that YouTube quickly discovered that in order to become an attractive platform for smaller creators, it has to make a way for non popular people to also get an audience. And so they started tweaking with the tweaking the algorithm. They do want to show people what they like and what they're engaging with, but they don't want to just push the most popular thing the way traditional media industries had. What result? What happened though, is that in tweaking the algorithm to sort of push more fringe content is that by roughly 2015, the things that the algorithm YouTube and Google had developed, the things that it privileged, were things that were long and things that elicited strong reactions, which are essentially conspiracy videos. And that led to a huge impact on global politics, culture, regulation or deregulation of all institutions, the rise of authoritarianism and right wing political activities all over the globe that again, scholars and politicians and legislators push back Against. And so YouTube adjusted the algorithm yet again by 2019. But it is just like, I think, useful as sort of an anecdote of like one small example of how this thing that is part of a broader trend of the South Korean government to use pop culture as a form of soft power and the spread of K pop and this fun little video that people turned into memes, flash mobs, and ended up all over the pop culture field that also directly shaped infrastructure and politics globally in ways that we're still experiencing. Right? And I think one of the reasons why we sort of focused on the object orientedness in the chapters is so students could see that. Because I think examples like that, like the object that then allows us to see how this one little thing spreads and changes everything about global digital culture is one of the things is more powerful than just trying to understand it as a logical series of events. Because if you think about it, it's not that logical. The actual how we got from Gangham style to authoritarian governments all over the world is not an easy story to explain. But if you take one example, you can parse apart the tiny changes, the tiny relationships between these that can produce those global changes.
- [16:39]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I really appreciate that about the collection. I think one of the things I'm often struggling with in my students is what our colleagues in sociology call the sociological imagination. Right. So we're looking at this object, but in doing so, we can look at such bigger picture issues, some structural, systemic, ideological issues. And so on the one hand, you might be telling your parents, oh, I'm studying TikTok in class, but on the other hand, you're studying so much more in the process. And that tangent has me thinking here about the importance of scale in this book. And in recent years we've seen renewed energy and studies of the local and regional, as well as continuing explorations of global frameworks and transnational frameworks. But here we're thinking about the planetary reframing, and I'm hoping we could talk a little bit more about the value and the payoff of doing so. Why is this planet digital and not global digital?
- [17:35]
Aswin Punathembakar
Jonathan, do you want to start and I'll jump in?
- [17:38]
Jonathan Gray
No, no, I think you should start because usually my answer to this question is to cite Aswen. So since we've got him here live, let's go to the source.
- [17:50]
Aswin Punathembakar
So you opened, Pete, by talking about situating this book within media and cultural studies and how we want to think about established frameworks of thinking through industries, audiences, texts, and everything else that goes with it. And I'll use that to say that our book is also in some ways paying homage to another really vital collection from two decades ago. this point, it was called Planet Television that Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar edited at a different moment of media globalization. Right. And in that collection, and in that moment, they were really grappling with ideas of sort of a flat world, a global village, and sort of slightly ahistorical notions. And they were really trying to think through all of these ideas with television as the key object that was producing all kinds of scalar dynamics. Right. So we were beginning to learn that we don't have to prioritize or at least default to the nation as some neat container for all media dynamics, while at the same time we don't have to make any broad kinds of crazy Thomas Friedman like assumptions about the global as this pre given thing either. And one of the best lines that I have taken to heart and that I use in class is to try to tell students that any scale that you can think of, a city, a locality, a neighborhood, the globe, the world, that these are not pre given Things that scale is process before it is product.
- [19:17]
Pete Kunze
Right.
- [19:18]
Aswin Punathembakar
And that idea really becomes a helpful methodological kind of conceit to say, how did this become or how. How are claims that this thing is global? Who's making those claims and why? Is it made through financial means? Is it an industry discourse? Is it the way audiences are constituted? And so we sort of built on all of that. And one of the things that became evident very quickly is that some of these ideas about things flowing seamlessly around the world were being floated by the tech industry yet again. And we really wanted to make sure students are given the tools to push back against tech industry ideas about disruption and seamless global flows and those sorts of ideas to say, what are the material dimensions of our digital world when we think about our devices? And all the way up to the platform economy, from the thing we hold in our hands all the way up to this abstract thing called the platform economy, what are the different ways in which we can unpack the different layers, different material layers, of mining and extraction and rare earth minerals starting all the way in the ground, all the way up to the satellites that are orbiting the Earth and everything in between that has a human cost, a financial cost, but also a deep ecological cost. And once that idea became clear to us, we wanted to make sure that the collection grappled with the idea that the planetary is, again, a scale that has always been with us and that the digital makes it newly relevant in important ways. And I guess I'll say this, that I think our students are grappling with questions of ecological crisis in ways that are ever more present for their generation than it was, perhaps even for my generation. I don't want to speak for Jonathan Adrian. And so taking that planetary optic meant helping them understand that globalization is also a process and that it's precisely through these global processes that we arrive at an understanding of what impact media have on a planetary scale. So that's one way in which I would begin to explain a planetary optic and really insist on the idea that it's always been with us, but it's become newly relevant and newly urgent. And the more we can do in our classes to connect those two ideas of the global and the planetary and keep them together the whole way through, was helpful for us to parse the digital and the global as part and parcel of the same media culture.
- [21:55]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, along those lines, I was really excited to see the chapter on data centers. Right. Because I think data centers is one of those issues where our students know that this is happening and this is important. And it kind of brings together these concerns over the material in a physical, environmental sense. But the materials, say, in the ideological, historical sense we've always kind of taught them about too. And to see that kind of chapter alongside chapters on Afrobeats and on Marvel, I think this is a really rich collection that people are going to get a lot out of.
- [22:24]
Aswin Punathembakar
I would add the WhatsApp chapter to that too, because the WhatsApp chapter, instead of rooting WhatsApp in the world of WhatsApp uncles and disinformation and whatnot, we made a conscious choice to look for a scholar and a contributor who could take that platform and embed it in a very different kind of cultural milieu. And we were just delighted that we could find somebody who could do that by thinking about WhatsApp in relation to Indigenous youth and their media practices, which brings the planetary back in a very different way. Right. So thinking about Indigenous knowledge communities and the way they think through their place in the world on this planet offers another kind of counterpoint to the data center's eco crisis. And that's where I think the cultural approach to digital cub media becomes really crucial.
- [23:14]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I thought was fun with editing a collection, you know, there are 28 pieces in this, aside from the introduction, and so it's quite large. And that gives you a lot of privilege to sort of take a multi pronged approach. And you know, on one hand we thought that there were some entities like Marvel or Bollywood, K Pop, that just sort of demand. And I've always demanded a chapter. And yet we still went to people and say, you know, what else can we learn about these? But then the other part of what was fun about it was thinking, as you said, about data centers or just talking to really smart people and saying, what's the example that perhaps people don't know that they should be talking about in the same way that they're talking about Marvel and how that brings things together. So, you know Pete Chepanek's piece about like Carnival Row, you know, that may not have the sort of same mileage globally as Bluey does, but I think he shows why a show like that might be just as important to think about as something like Carnival Row. And so it's fun when you've got a large collection like this, you can sort of go at it from so many different approaches.
- [24:28]
Pete Kunze
I'm glad to hear you talking about that positively, because as someone who is still working through the trauma of having edited collections, I received your book with A great deal of anxiety because I was thinking about how do you put together something this big that is drawing together so many topics, scholars based in so many different contexts, nationally and institutionally. So I'm wondering if we could talk about that. Right. When you had the idea for this collection, how did you go about parsing it out? Right, because one of the struggles of doing global media studies is representativeness and inclusiveness and feeling like you're really doing justice to the scale that comes with paying attention to our world and our planet.
- [25:11]
Adrian Shaw
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it was, it was an iterative process. Like, I mean, the book Kate is officially out next month, but we started working on it, I think was it like 2019, 2020 with the first ideas for it and starting coming up with a list of names of folks. And you know, we started with, as Jonathan said, like, what are the key companies, shows, platforms that we know that we need and who do we know who's been writing about those? So like, you know, it's kind, it was kind of a no brainer for us to ask Mark Steinberg, hey, can you write a quick short chapter explaining the history of anime and then the digital turn and whatever else you want to talk about? But it has to be 4,000 words, right? And so I think we were able to offer each author a very specific framework for what we were looking for. We were very, perhaps annoyingly strict with them, for example, on the formatting of the titles. It had to be the object and then what you want to say about the object. And yes, we went back and forth with authors a few times on titles because they wanted cutesy other titles. And we're like, nope, you need to keep this format in mind because this is the structure of each chapter and this is the thing that's going to hold it together is you're taking this object and telling us about something about the relationship between the global and the digital with it. And I think that helped us keep it a bit more contained. And then once we started, we identified the, you know, the high, the high request topics, the ones that if we're teaching a global or pop culture or digital culture class, what are the things that always come up? So had to be anime. We had to have at least one on K Pop. We ended up fortunately having K Pop and K dramas, something on creator culture. We know that we need to have Marvel Bluey. And then we started thinking, what isn't there, like, of the things that we thought of first, what are the things that we're Missing. So we endeavored to include sports because sports is often left out of pop cultural studies discussions, despite being a huge part of global popular culture. You know, from my perspective, it was important to include video games and Jonathan. And as one agreed for that. So we reached out. I reached out via my networks to find people who could talk about games not as located within a space, but as a global phenomenon. So we have two chapters that sort of think about the global stakes of gaming platforms, including music. Again, another example of a part of global popular culture that doesn't always make itself into pop culture textbooks or global pop culture textbooks. And I'll turn over to Oswin and Jonathan, but I think another one was like. And the regionality of it just sort of came together. And I think part of that is because as co editors for the series, we have with pretty extensive global networks. And so it wasn't that hard for us to find people. And especially because of Jonathan's work editing International Journal of Cultural Studies and Oswin's editing Media, Culture and Society, they also were aware of a broader network of people writing on these topics that allowed us to think about who to ask and if they couldn't do it, who would they tell us to then ask? Which was really helpful.
- [28:31]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, it's not that. Who would they then ask is sometimes fun. I think every. You know, this is the ninth edited collection I've worked on and I'm not gonna name names because I don't want anyone to feel like they weren't the first one invited. But in every single book I've worked on, there's like one or two chapters that I am extra proud of because they're written by someone who, like someone else was meant to do that chapter and then backed out. And we thought, oh, we need something on this. And we scrambled and we got somewhat. And the chapter just rocks. And so that nice sort of reminder that our field is sort of at a critical mass where there's always so many good people working on the topics there. It's the embarrassment of riches that if anything, is the challenge.
- [29:19]
Aswin Punathembakar
And I think as having gone through the editorial process for the series for many years, we also wanted to avoid from the beginning a sort of a neat mapping of global media cultures in our digital era onto pre given area studies frameworks. Like it could have been. It would have been relatively easy to say, here's five chapters on the Middle east and North Africa region, here's five chapters on Latin America, and so on and so forth. But we wanted to avoid that in part to reveal unexpected flows of media platforms, of connections that otherwise get too quickly dismissed. Right? So one of the sort of things that we are all really happy with is how we manage to get authors to take a platform that, yes, we should absolutely understand and study, but located in a context that students may not expect, right? So when we take something like as large as YouTube, but really have somebody do a fantastic job in 4,000 words of rooting it in Middle East, North African cultural history, it gives it a new kind of life, right? And I'm sure there are other chapters in which that sort of dynamic unfolds, and it really helps sort of unsettle any assumptions. The field might have scholars, but also that students might have about where things move and which platforms gain prominence in which parts of the world. So that's something that we are happy to have avoided. And I think reviewers were cautious about this object oriented approach, but we managed to prevail and we are happ that we did.
- [30:53]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. When I'm talking to my students especially are my seniors who are doing research projects, you know, and they want to know what's the difference between say, what we do versus say what a pop culture critic does? And I, I kind of just boil it down to rethink how we're thinking, right? Like, how can we reframe this? How can we come at this differently? How can. What are we missing? What are we misunderstanding? And to have these different case studies, but. But not necessarily in the way we would expect them or even by the person we would expect them from, right? Like, in addition to this being a very international group of scholars, we have early career folks and established scholars too, Right? And it was nice to see that mix as well. There's a lot to cover in those case studies and we won't be able to do it justice. But doing it justice would be buying the book listener. So what we'll talk about instead, I think, are the three major threads or facets of media and cultural studies industries, texts and audiences. And thinking about how each of these is being addressed in and across the volume, and maybe pointing to some of the representative examples along the way. So to begin, maybe we can think about industries broadly, right? Both commercial, creative and cultural industries, as well as institutions, technologies. How is that facet of media and cultural studies being addressed by some of these chapters, including those you've already mentioned, like WhatsApp and YouTube.
- [32:24]
Jonathan Gray
I mean, I can kick it off by saying one of the things I liked is this sort of, as Aswan referred to earlier, we wanted to avoid this just being embroiled in that same sort of 80s moment where, you know, cultural imperialism was the fear. And that's why I really like, for instance, Shauna Kidman's piece on Marvel because she looks at how, you know, Disney really tried and Marvel really tried to sort of make cultural imperialism work for them. And it worked for a little while in the form of the Avengers and then it fell apart. And so I really like that as a sort of. It's not the battle that we used to have with cultural imperialism, which is we either think it's happening or we believe in audiences. Her point is it's not as easy as it looks. So we've got that as a sort of retort to. But then also there are a whole bunch of other chapters where it was, you know, looking at what are some of the new industries that are around. So looking at creator cultures was key to us and, you know, getting like, for instance, Jianlin and Daniel Craig's Mukbang and Chibo chapter is really good at thinking about a new form of industry.
- [33:36]
Adrian Shaw
I don't know.
- [33:36]
Jonathan Gray
Jump in on, on this Aswana reading.
- [33:38]
Aswin Punathembakar
Yeah. On the industries front, I guess we could say one of our goals was to have a range of objects that would reveal to readers and students that the notion of there's no such thing as a monolithic media industry and that depending on the specific region we are discussing or the flow between specific regions, that the questions of power, questions of cultural agency, questions of audiences would have to be calibrated accordingly. So when we're thinking about, say for example, with the two chapters on sports, with FIFA plus and with cricket in the Caribbean, for instance, in those cases, I think there is an absolutely good argument to be made about top down industry and financial power and questions of capitalism and imperialism are absolutely in play in those contexts. But then when you take something like say, Spotify and Afrobeats together, you get a slightly more nuanced understanding of how corporate power meets vernacular creativity and how genre and textuality muddles those kinds of dynamics in interesting sorts of ways. Right. So I guess to go back to your starting point about how do we bring digital studies in a study circuit of culture kind of approach, we wanted to make sure that taken together as readers move through industries while also thinking about audiences and text, or coming in from a textual perspective, but keeping in mind the background industrial dynamics and cultural forces, you always arrive at it in a slightly more nuanced fashion and avoid making any top down claims, regardless of whether it's industry or textual effects. Or audience politics or audience agency or any of those sorts of keys. And I think this is something we all aspire to do, which is to what's all sort of maxim to think culturally about politics and politically about culture. And that shapes the way in which I think every author approaches this. I'll point to Anamik Saha's chapter on diasporic production and streaming videos, another great example of how what he calls a post colonial cultural economy is a much better phrase and much better framework to use, rather than simply saying what does streaming television and Netflix's power do to diasporic media production in the UK? Well, what happens to the histories of Channel 4 and the BBC and other forms of grassroots production that's happened in that context? So to bring those histories into a conversation with Netflix and Prime Video power is perhaps a better approach. And I think that's what different chapters do differently, regardless of whether they privilege industries or techs or audiences as their entry point.
- [36:19]
Adrian Shaw
Yeah, and I'll add that one of the things I really like that it wasn't planned for, but it sort of cuts across several chapters, is a focus on workers and labor, especially because I teach in a program that is very media production focused. So we have a lot of students who are going to be moving into these industries. And it's actually really valuable to have things like Erin Belut's chapter on the precarity in the Turkish television dramas industry and the lived experience of having to work within a very brutal industry. Or Peter's chapter on Carnival Row thinking about, yes, on the one hand, this global streaming economy has led to an influx of money into Central European film industry, but what does that look like for workers on the ground, especially when those big companies decide to pull out? But it's not a one to one one. It's not a unidirectional story. Because we also have the case of Nollywood, where, you know, he makes the case, or he makes the case that the sort of more new avant garde filmmaking in Nollywood is actually being funded by Netflix. Like this kind of stories that the internal industry within the country is privileging or supporting or giving funding to people who want to make something different than that can go outside of the country to this corporate platform that will give them money to help change what that media industry is producing. And that opens up really fun, debatable questions in a classroom. Whereas, like, it's not wholly bad, it's not wholly good. There are benefits and drawbacks to all of these systems, but it allows us to, I think, talk through the really specific particularities of it. In the same way that I think, you know, the Afrobeats chapter was really helpful, helpful in focusing on law and legislation and these things we think we understand about things like copyright law and what that means for media industries. And actually, if we explode that out into a planetary perspective, it's not as easy as saying, like, strong IP protection helps creators. It doesn't always, like, in their contexts and global contexts especially, that we can point to examples of that not being true. The other thing that I like that cuts across the chapters is this focus on the lived reality of global digital from an industry side. So not just the thinking about structures and rules and legislation, but actually thinking about what that looks like for the people in these industries and the kinds of questions they have to ask themselves every day.
- [38:55]
Aswin Punathembakar
And I guess one final piece I'll add is we also wanted to make sure that we capture, like Adrian said, along the lived experiences dimension, questions of pleasure as well.
- [39:05]
Pete Kunze
Right.
- [39:05]
Aswin Punathembakar
I mean, this is something that we don't acknowledge quite as much or haven't theorized and thought through quite enough, I think. But there, I think some of the chapters do a really lovely job. The chapter on podcasting, the chapter on Queer Eye, for example, and think there's got to be others. The social media challenges which speak to questions of play and pleasure. I think that's another dimension of our digital world and our lived experiences where with these various digital platforms and infrastructures and even the planetary perspective that the play that we witnessed at the height of COVID 19, with the little. Not the little, the large container ship that got grounded and the means that then emerged out of it, in which we were all struggling to make sense of our very much connected planet, speaks to how much pleasure and politics are so tightly woven together that some attention to that was equally important.
- [40:03]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I'm hoping we can take that a step further because I'd be interested to hear the perspective of those of you in the room. But it feels like we're on the precipice of a turn or renewed interest in audience research and audience studies. I mean, we've seen some really exciting collections and articles over the last three or four years that have kind of renewed this tradition in our field. And I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit more along the lines of what Osman was adding there at the end about the role of. Of audiences, of participation, maybe even spectatorship, imagined audiences in this collection.
- [40:40]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, I mean, I really hope we're on the verge of a rebirth of audience studies because it needs it. And there's some great people doing work now. And so it was fun to get in that. In fact, the K Pop chapter, I mean, it's called K Pop, but it's very much about K Pop fans. And certainly, I mean, you know, K Pop fans have. It's one of those interesting media objects that the press itself is fascinated with. Right. You know, when no one shows up to a political event because BTS fans have organized to get all the tickets and then not show up. I mean, we're getting events like this that just sort of scream at us to understand how fans are working better. So that, I mean, obviously that chapter does some neat work there too. But I think across the chapters, I always really proud and excited to see a bunch of our writers really think about, you know, where is the audience in this? Not often having the time or space to do sort of, you know, roll up the sleeves audience research per se, but much more opening the door to realizing that there are audiences there, that it's not just the tech. I think that's one of the key problems I've had with this, the streaming algorithmic era, as we get so excited by everything that's happening at the tech level and how that's being sort of manifested at the industrial level that we forget to ask what audiences are doing and we have all these broad assumptions about what it means to be an audience and binging and so forth. But we're left with a large amount of questions of why people turn to these things. And that's engaged by several writers. So again, I to like, for instance, the piece on Squid Game by Daliang Jin doesn't include audience research, but he's really wrestling with the idea of universality. And that was invoked by a lot of press discussing Squid Game. Is it successful? Because it's a narrative that we all can identify with. And so I really like when we're getting the audience appearing in these. These stories again too, because in both digital studies and global Studies, too often the audience has just sort of been an afterthought.
- [43:01]
Adrian Shaw
Yeah. And I mean speaking to the sort of the nitty gritty practical, which is again something that I really appreciate about this book. One of the things that was sort of an unexpected thread that I think speaks to audiences is this focus on time. Because in teaching global digital culture, it's one of the things that I have to remind students about over all the time is like, just because we technically live in a globally connected Internet world, doesn't mean that time zones don't matter. And one of the things that Mark Johnson talks about in his Twitch chapter is how if you are a Japanese streamer who's trying to reach a global audience, or at least a European audience, you change your streaming time to map what time the global audience you're reaching for is awake. It's not just a anytime you're awake, you can stream and get an audience. You have to think about time zones and shift your entire body to grab that global audience. And then in our chapter on cricket, Douglas talks about this as well. The impact of the outsized impact of India on global cricket culture means that you have games streamed from the Caribbean in the middle of the workday when nobody's at the stadium, being streamed to a global audience, mostly in India and Southeast Asia at a time when it's prime time for them. Right. And so it's not being constructed for the local audience who would physically go to the game. It's being constructed for a global streaming audience who could watch it at a different time. And I think that thinking about the appeal and the joy of like, what are the things, like why is Bluey a global phenomenon? Why is why was Squid games a global phenomenon? Like the joy part. But also thinking about audiences as sometimes the local audience gets left out of the global digital popular culture in favor of a global audience that's seen as more valuable. And I think that there's also just sort of, as somebody who does digital media studies, where the audience is in the Internet is always such a tricky question, like who is the audience for social media challenges? Is it the people themselves making it? Aren't they to the audience? Because they're speaking to this global trend of different types of social media challenges. And I think the different chapters do a good job of situating the audience even within things that aren't ostensibly about the audience.
- [45:28]
Pete Kunze
And I wanted to circle back to the middle of that triptych I set up, which is the text. What role does textuality form, Genre, narratology, formalism? Jonathan, I don't want to call you out, but you did just co edit Reading Media, so I feel like you are ethically required to take the lead on this. But for those of us who see textual analysis as key to our arsenal, how does that's a little violent as part of our intellectual toolkit. How is that question coming through here and helping to really show that industry text and audience are never wholly divided? Right. They're always co constitutive. But I'm starting to answer the question. So I'm going to put it on the next.
- [46:17]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love is that if you open up the table of contents, you could just. There's some words in italics that tell us we've got texts. And some of those, like I said with Dal Yongjin's piece about Squid Game and really do wrestle with the textuality, whereas some others, like Bluey is very much a story about the regulation of Bluey and about how the Australian Broadcasting Corporation absolutely scuffed getting the money from it and how the BBC and Disney now own the rights to it. And then you've got other ones, like Anamik Saha's piece on We Are Lady Parts, which kind of, you know, is both a story about text but also a story, again, about public broadcasting. And yet then there are other pieces in there that, you know, that the title makes it seem like this is going to be a piece about, you know, it's very industrial or it's going to be infrastructural. And yet the text becomes sort of central to how we're thinking about it. And that's. I'm excited by that. Right. Because even though, yes, I just did edit a piece on co Edit a collection on textural analysis, what we were calling for there was not everyone do textual analysis all the time, but the texture analysis always be part of the repertoire. So I'm excited when people start with what seems like it's going to be texture analysis and check, cheat and do something else as well. But I'm also excited when people start with something that is also industrial analysis or audience analysis, but that quote, cheats and gets your texture analysis in there, as you said, so that it shows that you really can't and shouldn't separate one from the other.
- [48:02]
Pete Kunze
As we head into the home stretch, I'm going to ask another large question, which is I'm curious to hear from each of you, what did you learn in the process of doing this collection? And at the outset there was a mention that the hope is to kind
- [48:18]
Adrian Shaw
of
- [48:21]
Pete Kunze
charge the field with where they might go from here. What kind of research do you hope might come out of this collection? Or even what kind of courses too? Right. Because this is so eminently teachable as a volume. So I think in the heart of that comment was what did you learn and what do you hope future research might take up through the inspiration provided by this kind of volume?
- [48:46]
Adrian Shaw
I mean, I don't know if he'll listen to this, but I'm sure Douglas Brunton will be very thrilled to know that I learned a lot more about cricket than I ever expected to, and also how much the game has been changed by global popular culture. But in a more serious sense, I think that there are elements of global policies and infrastructures that I intellectually know exist, but I couldn't explain specific examples. So I think, for example, being able to explain to my students now how Spotify Streams do or do not get people paid, it's a very basic question as an instructor, but it requires the kind of deep knowledge of that platform that I would not have otherwise had. So I think having it summarized for me was really helpful. I also think the thinking about things like, like there are things about, you know, I'm a video game scholar, there are things about the Steam skin trading market that I just, I. It never occurred to me that that would be such a rich vein for analysis. But that chapter, sort of. We made them scale back that chapter, there is so much more to the interdynamics of global finance within the Steam marketplace, especially in China, than we would have regularly seen. And I think thinking about those intersections, like the intersections each chapter brings together of regulation, the content itself and what we think audiences want to do and are doing, is something that I wish digital media studies in general could be better at. Like not just thinking about platforms when we're thinking about platforms and audiences when we're thinking about audiences, but thinking about them simultaneously in the same project. And I think if these authors can do it in 4,000 chapters, I think it provides a really good framework for being able to pull together all of those threads in a single project moving forward.
- [50:39]
Jonathan Gray
I hate to correct you, but you said 4,000 chapters and I'm not doing another 3,000 words. I learned a lot, but. No, just kidding.
- [50:50]
Aswin Punathembakar
Yeah.
- [50:50]
Jonathan Gray
No, I would just say one of the things I love about. About editing collections is that you kind of get to, you know, it's like scholarship on demand. Like, I want someone to do this and then someone goes and does it. Or I need this for a class. But one of the reasons I love co editing is because then, you know, you get to work with the likes of Adrian and Aswin, who have such a great grasp on of the field and who's in it and of the other topics that matter. And so as we were putting it together, you know, some of the ones, you know, like Aswan referred to, the one on WhatsApp, I was always a little suspicious about that, but I love it. So it's one of the things that I learned a lot of the things that I should be asking for on demand and really the vibrancy of the field in general. As I said, there's just so many people working on it and doing such good work that it's really easy to be proud of a book like this because the parts I'm proud of, it's everything else that other people brought. So it's not at all narcissistic to say it.
- [52:12]
Aswin Punathembakar
No, I like how that too. I mean, part of it is the joy of co editing, right. And when you have someone like Jonathan with the experience he has of editing, I don't know, 51 edited volumes at this point, or Adrian, who really pulled us in directions that, let's say, had it been just Jonathan and I, we wouldn't have even known to venture in those directions. So I think there's something to be said about our rootedness in different disciplinary pockets while being, even if only dimly aware of other domains that we could easily sort of correct each other and sort of push each other in different directions. But one thing that I came away with is how much I need to also be comparative in my thinking about and being able to move across filmic, televisual, game music, sort of. So I really hope this sort of helps students, but also others in our field come to terms with being intermediate in a genuine sense of being, of thinking about media broadly constrained, construed, and really shedding our fields sort of medium specific kinds of pasts that we've engaged with and really start going in that direction.
- [53:26]
Pete Kunze
And finally, as we come to the end of our conversation, I wanted to return to the beginning of it, which was mentioning that this volume marks the end of your shared tenure as the co editors of Critical Communication Studies series at NYU Press. And thank you for that. I mean, it's been a series that I think a lot of us have learned so much from. And many of us here at the New Books Network have had the privilege of interviewing authors who published with the three of you over that time. But the neoliberal in me has to ask, what are you working on? And what comes next? Where are your energies going?
- [54:05]
Adrian Shaw
Well, I broke my foot about a week and a half ago, so all of my energies are going into healing a bone. But in the serious academic sense, I've been working on for the past year and a half a project with Katherine Sender and Travers Scott on an intellectual history of queer media studies that was originally supposed to be a one off quick summer project last summer. And because we are who we are has quickly spiraled into an all encompassing data management project that is probably going to end up in multiple different iterations, but trying to map what has now become called queer media studies by looking at the history of the field of media and communication and the tributaries into it.
- [54:52]
Jonathan Gray
Yeah, and I've been working, struggling for a long time now with writing up some work on streaming audience. I did a big project there and I'm just swimming in the data and finally I think getting it together. So watch this space. I've now promised something so I'll have to deliver.
- [55:15]
Aswin Punathembakar
It feels a little shameless, but I'll say that I have another book with NYU Press coming out later this October. Pete, if you want to do another New Books Network interview, absolutely. But that book maps the relationship between popular culture and politics in India, specifically, as digital platforms have changed the way in which objects move across terrain and how in rare instances, something from the domain of the popular erupts into the domain of the political and offers a new kind of vocabulary and style for citizenship.
- [55:48]
Pete Kunze
Excellent. Excellent. Well, I hope all three of you will come back with those projects. I'd love to talk with you again and thank you all for your time today. This has been a real pleasure.
- [55:56]
Adrian Shaw
Pleasure.
- [55:57]
Jonathan Gray
Thank you for your time, Pete. I mean, you're doing a great service to the field by doing these interviews, so thank you. I appreciate it.
- [56:04]
Aswin Punathembakar
Thank you so much.
- [56:06]
Pete Kunze
My pleasure. The books are free too, which helps. The book today is Planet Digital A Global Media Cultures Reader, available now from New York University Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been New Books in Media and Communications on the New Book Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [56:27]
New Books Network Host
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