Millennial Turbulence: The Networking of Tamil Media Politics

Abstract

With the arrival of the satellite television news channel Puthiya Thalaimurai (New Generation) in 2011 and the contemporaneous proliferation of smartphone-enabled social media, a democratic politics long dominated by the world of popular cinema has found it difficult to reproduce itself in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Focusing on digitally targeted caste violence and mass protests in the name of the Tamil nation, this article argues that the networked publicity of satellite television and new media have layered themselves over existing infrastructures of mass-mediated populism. Many of the political challenges to existing structures fueled by newer media forms appear as shorter-term events, consisting of tighter, sometimes explosive temporal loops intersecting with longer-term formations. New media have thus taken advantage of the affective and narrative potentials within cinematic populism, all the while reflexively marking themselves as “new” in relation to the forms they have become parasitic upon.