Lin Song is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. His works have appeared in Convergence, Feminist Media Studies, and Continuum. He is also the author of Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong University Press 2021).
Avishek Ray is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar, India. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020).
Platformization has drastically intensified media flows. The immediacy and hyper-connectedness of multimedia platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Netflix render possible media convergence. In parallel, we, however, observe an underlying trend of media “deconvergence” (Jin 2011) in Asia, where geopolitics generates fragmentation, discontinuity, and decoupling in the transmission of media technologies and content. As a result, inter-Asia connections are constantly made and unmade, defying a linear progressive understanding of inter-Asia intermediality. This paper aims at providing a nuanced understanding of Inter-Asian media production in an age more connected yet divided than ever. Using the recent TikTok ban in India as a case study, it points to how notions of political partisanship undercuts the discourse of intermediality in Asia. We employ “techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to understand how “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006) live out, negotiate and articulate intermediality in a hyper-mediatized, but (digitally) territorialized, world. Drawing on content and discourse analyses of discussion threads on Reddit and Quora about the TikTok ban, the paper sets out to explore: how is TikTok perceived as a “Chinese” platform, as contrasted (and simultaneously integral) to, a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indianness”? Put differently, how does such a techno-nationalist standpoint ascribe “Chinese-ness” upon TikTok, both as a media platform and increasingly a new media format? And, finally, to what extent does techno-nationalism restrict and reshape inter-Asia media “flows” by constructing imagined digital territories?