Smith Mehta – författare

Global South Creator Cultures situates creator labour within the geographic specificities of nation-states and examines the working conditions of social media creators and the geographical challenges of their work, offering a four-part conceptual framework for studying creator cultures. Rather than placing creator cultures in the Global South against those in the Global North to produce a series of binaries, it prioritises expanding our frames of reference for studying creator labour. It does so by examining creator cultures in India, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and China through approaches from media, communication, and cultural studies, as well as internet, platform, and creator studies. Rich with grounded subjective experiences of Global South creators, this collection is essential reading for students and academics of media, communication, and cultural studies, and appeals to anyone interested in understanding the complex relationship between nation-states, social media platforms, and creators.

Global South Creator Cultures situates creator labour within the geographic specificities of nation-states and examines the working conditions of social media creators and the geographical challenges of their work, offering a four-part conceptual framework for studying creator cultures. Rather than placing creator cultures in the Global South against those in the Global North to produce a series of binaries, it prioritises expanding our frames of reference for studying creator labour. It does so by examining creator cultures in India, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and China through approaches from media, communication, and cultural studies, as well as internet, platform, and creator studies. Rich with grounded subjective experiences of Global South creators, this collection is essential reading for students and academics of media, communication, and cultural studies, and appeals to anyone interested in understanding the complex relationship between nation-states, social media platforms, and creators.

New Screen Ecology in India is an open access book that provides an in depth exploration of the digital transformation of the Indian media industry.Smith Mehta takes a deep dive into the world of social media platforms and their impact on contemporary film and television production, arguing that they have fundamentally shifted the creator dynamics of these industries. Through first-hand research with creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks, Mehta develops the concept of the ‘new screen ecology’. He reveals how the Indian screen industries are affected by the social relations between these agents, and how industrial practices are blurring the amateur-professional divide through creator and content interdependencies.Mehta goes beyond theoretical analysis by interrogating the production practices of 13 different platforms and portals, including Hotstar, Netflix, YouTube, and TVFPlay. He analyses the extent to which they benefit from the lack of censorship and restrictive industrial practices that are characteristic of traditional media structures. By doing so, he provides a unique and insightful examination of the dynamics of digital transformation in the screen industries in a region-specific context.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. This book has been published open access thanks to the financial support of the Open Access Book Fund of the University of Groningen.