Being Indian in the time of transnational screen media cultures: An urban children’s study

Abstract

This study aimed to answer these research questions: what role do transnational screen media play in how urban Indian children think about their culturally hybrid identities? In what ways does transnational screen media consumption influence these children's perceptions of their lived sociocultural realities? Using survey and ethnographic research methods comprising a survey for children, participant observation and in-depth interviews with children, and in-depth interviews with parents and teachers, the research for the study was conducted in Bangalore city in southern India. The study found that the children’s major socialization agents, i.e. the family, the school and the transnational screen media they consumed played an interrelational role in children’s formulating and negotiating their culturally hybrid identities. The implication of this finding is that as these children mature, they are challenged to exercise a critical reflexivity that may only reconcile the differences between their perceptions of mediated globalities and their lived sociocultural contexts uneasily, at the intersections of these children’s sociocultural identity markers.