Papers by Hrishikesh Arvikar
Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging pl... more Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging platform economy within the historical evolution of market exchange in the subcontinent. I argue that the market systems constituted by media platforms are, like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their interaction with other markets. In India, this includes the aggregation of erstwhile media industries along with informal markets for ‘services’, increasingly under the aegis of finance capital and the operators of mobile digital infrastructure. From this wider perspective, we can trace the expansion of a ‘mediated economy’ through which an increasing number of exchanges are being aggregated within portals designed to value capture from social economies. Rather than framing this process as disruptive, this paper seeks to illustrate how India's platform economy has been shaped by pathways established within the distinctive economics of media systems.
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Papers by Hrishikesh Arvikar