“How can a small app piss off an entire country?”: India’s TikTok ban in the light of everyday techno-nationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chineseness” is a populist affective outcome of the discursive articulation of Indian “nationhood,” achieved by the effective use of an us-versus-them rhetoric, which signifies a process of digital territorialization amid globalized media flows. Second, we observe that the classist-casteist narrative underscoring TikTok’s association with “cringeworthiness” marginalizes the working-class content creators – so prominently visibilized by TikTok – both from the media landscape and the nationalist imagination. Fundamentally, India’s TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people’s media practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of digital technology, which, ironically, within a globalized era, seems to be only notionally more connected, but practically more partisan than ever.