ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a critical agenda for South Asian television studies keeping mediatized public and its mobilization at the centre of analysis. The public in itself is an ever-elusive empty space always to be filled with meanings. The elementary signifier that makes it possible to imagine the public beyond a physically assembled crowd is the audience/users. The crowd and the audience/users create an inter-constitutive sphere of public opinion and action that remains inconceivable without examining the overlapping media networks. I focus in this chapter on how mainstream Indian news television has played and still continues to play a crucial role in shaping post-liberalization Indian publicness. The category that I propose is ‘live public’, in the sense of a large set of mediatized public, utterly de-territorialized as is typically manifest from the now passé SMS polls to the current form of social media, territorialized in billions of TV homes and re-territorialized with cellphones into the streets as justice-seekers or lynch mobs.
