Mass Media and Visual Anthropology: Applications in Contemporary Society

Switch on the television in most Indian households this evening and you will find it competing with two or three phone screens, a music app playing in the background, and perhaps a tablet propped up in the kitchen. Anthropologists have only recently begun asking a simple but important question: what does it mean that so much of daily life is now organised around screens and broadcasts? Mass media is not just a channel for news and entertainment. It is a set of objects, habits, and shared experiences that shape how communities see themselves and each other. This piece traces how anthropology built a vocabulary for studying media, and why India has become such a rich site for testing that vocabulary.

What anthropologists mean by “mass media” 🔗

When anthropologists talk about mass media, they usually mean something broader than “TV and newspapers.” Debra Spitulnik’s influential definition covers the electronic media of radio, television, film and recorded music, along with the print media of newspapers, magazines and popular literature. What makes her framing useful is that she treats these forms as artifacts, experiences, practices and processes all at once, rather than as neutral technologies that simply carry content from one place to another. A newspaper is an object you hold, a habit you build your morning around, and part of a larger system of production and circulation.

For a discipline built on long-term fieldwork in villages and small communities, this was a slow realisation. Anthropologists showed relatively limited interest in mass media until the early 1990s. Ironically, some of the most useful groundwork came not from anthropology departments but from British cultural studies, which borrowed anthropological methods to understand how ordinary people related to television and radio.

The audience question and British cultural studies 🔗

Cultural studies scholars in Britain began interviewing television audiences inside their own homes, trying to understand how people actually made sense of what they watched. Anthropological critics were unconvinced. They argued that a handful of interviews in someone’s living room did not amount to the sustained, immersive observation that “ethnography” is supposed to involve. That disagreement mattered because it forced the discipline to ask a harder question: what would a genuinely anthropological study of media even look like, and how long would it need to run to earn that label?

Appadurai’s mediascapes and media’s centrality to life 🔗

The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai pushed the field further with his concept of “mediascapes,” part of a broader argument that global culture flows through several overlapping landscapes of people, technology, finance, ideas and media. Appadurai’s central claim was that mass media had become central to everyday life by the late twentieth century, and that anthropology could no longer treat it as a side interest. Faye Ginsburg and her co-editors later pointed to something as ordinary as the placement of a television set inside a home as evidence of how deeply media had settled into domestic life.

This centrality creates a methodological puzzle. Once media saturates daily life, it becomes genuinely difficult to separate “the audience” from “the production process,” since the same person might watch a serial in the morning and forward a clip about it by evening, blurring consumption and circulation. The filmmaker and anthropologist David MacDougall’s use of the term “audience” itself came under scrutiny, with scholars questioning whether the word carried an elitist bias by assuming a passive mass on the receiving end of media rather than active participants shaping it.

Media anthropology finds its footing in India 🔗

In India, this line of inquiry arrived later than in Western academia and still occupies an unusual position. Researchers describe media anthropology as an emerging discipline within Indian universities, with departments only recently beginning to treat it as a distinct specialisation rather than a footnote to other topics. This is partly a matter of institutional history. Indian anthropology departments traditionally built their identity around material culture and ethnographic museums, documenting artefacts, kinship systems and tribal communities rather than television schedules or film sets. Widening that focus is not a small adjustment. Indian scholarship notes that media studies conducted in Asia often diverge from those in the West, paying closer attention to how media reshapes cultural flows between regions rather than only how audiences receive individual programmes at home. The sheer scale of “mass media” in a country with hundreds of television channels, dozens of film industries and a rapidly growing base of internet users means anthropologists have to think carefully about which slice of that landscape they can realistically study. Ginsburg and her collaborators describe this as the permeable boundary of anthropological discourse on media, where scholarship increasingly runs beyond any single place or culture, and an Indian case study can speak just as easily to debates happening in Nigeria or the Philippines.

Television as everyday practice, and Bollywood’s “imagined consumption” 🔗

The media theorist Roger Silverstone made an argument that anthropologists found particularly useful: watching television is not one act but a bundle of daily practices that together constitute the experience of the medium, from deciding what to watch, to who controls the remote, to the conversations a show generates afterward. Extending this logic, scholars argue that media reception happens well beyond the living room, just as production happens well beyond the studio, since scripts, gossip and expectations travel through many hands before a show ever airs. Tejaswini Ganti’s research on Bombay’s film industry gives this idea concrete shape. Her study of Hindi filmmakers, described in coverage of her book on the industry’s transformation, shows how the Hindi film industry reshaped itself while remaking foreign films for local audiences. Rather than translating Hollywood scripts directly, filmmakers rework the plot, music and pacing to match what Indian audiences are assumed to expect, a practice Ganti calls “imagined consumption.” This process does more than adapt a film; it legitimises borrowing by treating the original as a strategically raided resource rather than a fixed text to be copied outright. For producers, imagined consumption becomes a genuinely practical decision-making tool, guiding choices about casting, songs, and even which subplots survive the transition from one industry to another.

Digitalisation and the expanding media landscape 🔗

The growth of digital platforms has made this entire field harder to pin down. As media content multiplies across apps, streaming services and social platforms, anthropologists and communication researchers face a genuinely bigger task: tracking not just how content is made, but how it is generated, spread and kept alive across very different platforms and audiences. The old definition of “mass media” as a handful of broadcast channels is stretching under the weight of new electronic devices and increasingly compact, networked technology. This shift matters because the pace and sheer volume of content have both increased sharply. A single news event can generate thousands of reinterpretations, memes and rebuttals within hours, and media anthropology has a real role to play in making sense of what that speed does to communities. One consequence is the emergence of what researchers call intimate media spaces: closer, more frequent interaction between civil society groups, individuals and diverse interest groups than older broadcast media ever allowed for. A WhatsApp family group or a niche YouTube comment section can now shape opinion in ways that a single newspaper editorial never could.

What do you think? Does treating a WhatsApp forward or a trending reel as a legitimate object of anthropological study feel like a natural extension of the discipline, or a stretch too far from its roots in long-term fieldwork? And if Hindi cinema’s “imagined consumption” reshapes foreign stories for local audiences, what other everyday media habits around you might be doing something similar without anyone naming it?

References

1. https://sk.sagepub.com/hnbk/edvol/21stcenturyanthro/chpt/mass-media-anthropology
2. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog380
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2638265
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp02/chapter/media-and-communication-anthropology/
5. https://www.routledge.com/Television-And-Everyday-Life/Silverstone/p/book/9780415016476
6. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2012/march/tejaswini-ganti-takes-reader-inside-bollywood-with-latest-book.html