Another C3 Consulting Researcher who is establishing his own branded place in the blogosphere is Dr. Aswin Punathambekar. For those who are within the Consortium and who receive our C3 Weekly Update on a regular basis, you have read some of Aswin's work in the past. He often writes about examples from Bollywood and film culture, in relation to a lot of the activities we define here as "convergence culture."
Aswin's blog, called BollySpace 2.0, relaunched recently to detail his thoughts about the media industries in South Asia. Aswin's international perspective often ties into what we write about as "pop cosmopolitanism," but deals as well with new media forms of distribution, the activities of fan communities, transmedia storytelling, and all the other issues we write about here at C3 on a regular basis.
Of particular interest among the handful of posts Aswin has made since he relaunched BollySpace 2.0 is this piece on Second Life. He writes about how, of the 12,000 active Indian users in Second Life, 9,000 of them are from New Delhi. Aswin compares the real-estate struggles these New Delhi users of Second Life are embroiled in to issues of land struggles and land politics in India.
Aswin also provides some quick links to help further readers' understanding of Bollywood.
His blog just recently relaunched, so be sure to keep an eye on it for some interesting content, as Aswin begins his career as a professor and continues as a professional media scholar.
He was a substantial help to Henry Jenkins as Henry worked toward the writing of the book Convergence Culture, which was one of the guiding principles of the launch of the Consortium. He graduated with his Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT. He recently successfully defended his doctorate through the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, entitled "Bollystan: Bollywood, New Media, and Transnationalism in Contemporary India."
Aswin is now teaching international and comparative media for the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
