media, information, the contemporary

Author: Darshana Sreedhar


  • The Medium is the Message? Gossip and Hybrid Televisuality of Malayalee House

    In McLuhan’s view the emergent televisuality of the time was marked by an intricate structural relationship between the new forms of media such as television and their function as social carriers of messages. In this post I look at ‘gossip’ as a formal constituent of Malayalee House and as an integral part of the cultural and social content contained therein… The incessant repetition and replicability of the information as it is relayed across digital social media also in many ways resembles the circuits of gossip… I argue that the use of gossip as a framing device in Malayalee House is analogous to the ways social media operates in assembling scattered bits of information…

  • Santosh Pandit Hate Groups and Memes: Online Ethnography of Social Media

    In the interaction with members of hate groups, what became evident was that memes served multiple purposes, depending more on the viewer’s prior knowledge of the person/event spoofed.At the same time, no one identified the term “meme” or “meming” (a relatively new term for many of my respondents) in our conversations. On the other hand, they described the act of meming as an extension of their everyday Facebook activity where it featured as what they called padam (picture) with “dialogues”… The intensity of circulation of these memes was such that even the fan’s groups widely shared memes brought out by the hate groups…

  • Posters of Krishneyum Radheyum pasted over posters of the Mohanlal starrer, Casanova.

    Santosh Pandit: Negative Publicity and Durablity of the “Superstar of the Poor”

    Till the release of the song sequence on YouTube, the name Pandit was unknown even to the most avid film enthusiasts in Kozhikode, the place from where he hails. Except a few who knew him as an enthusiastic man in his forties who was struck by the cinema-bug and attempted to make a few albums, no one had any clear memory of his talents exhibited otherwise. But, in no time he mobilized a huge fan following and a strong virtual presence through fan pages…

  • santhosh pandit

    Digital Divide, Online Offense: Malayalee House, “Pandit Phenomenon” and Morality Debates in Contemporary Kerala

    My project looks at two contemporary phenomena in the Kerala mediascape — the emergence of “internet celebrity” Santhosh Pandit, and the recent reality TV show, Malayalee House, both of which have been amplified by the digital-social media’s potential to unsettle intended trajectories and uses of media circulation. In corollary, these have also inaugurated new ways of thinking about what it is to be a “media celebrity” in Kerala.