Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026)
From The MIT Press Podcast by The MIT Press
June 2, 2026 · 1h 1m
About this episode
The episode discusses the impact of mobile media distribution on India's aspirational politics and digital infrastructure.
Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of aspirational goals. Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and logistics of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, critical…
People in this episode
Guest: Rahul Mukherjee
Topics covered
- digital infrastructure
- mobile media
- aspirational politics
- content distribution
- India
- streaming services
Keywords
- data revolution
- neo-middle class
- content delivery networks
- vernacular music
- streaming video-on-demand
- ethnographic fieldwork
- participatory cultures
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: MIT Press
Books & works: Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution
Places: India, Digital India
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