EDITORIAL Intermedia emergence: The fourth screen We live today, in the Diaspora, and on the subcontinent enwrapped in increasingly instantaneous media flows. Yet this is not a more complex media ecology than that which prior generations experienced. It is qualitatively different, and its conceptual framework must also qualitatively change. Not surprisingly, many critics have noted how globalization is marked by intensive media becomings: rates of flow, density of information, gradients of noise (entropy) in communication channels, emergent media-body multiplicities, resonation of intensity across populations. In places as disparate as Jackson Heights (Queens, NY); Star City (Birmingham, UK); Jahangirabad, Bhopal (MP); Chor Bazaar, Mumbai (Maharashtra); or Maruthahalli (Bangalore), changes in access to technology, and shifts in computer-aided perception have transformed the very nature of value, consumption, pleasure, and work. Capitalist, non-capitalist, bazaar-capitalist, new media today moves and exists across technological platforms to valorize brands and logos, styles and sensation, movements and affects in a way that necessitates a clear consideration of the relevance and limitation of nation-based analyses of these becomings. The movement of information is better understood not as the free play of virtual and arbitrary signifiers disseminating the order words of the secular, modernizing nation-state, but through concepts such as patterned flow, gradients of intensity, molar and minor becomings, controlled modulation, affective and emergent capacities, bodily kinesthesia, and creative value. These concepts taken from a range of contemporary forms of critique – feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, biopolitical – necessitate that we go back to older critical frameworks with a pragmatic understanding of their changing domain of validity. The emergence of the new media today in South Asia has signaled an event the meaning of which remains obscure, but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity. These phase transitions are the occasion when fluctuations (noise) in a volatile system (a body, a media ecology, a public sphere) have both macroscopic effects, and a new capacity to ‘sense’ shifts in force. Contemporary media ecologies in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the ‘national’ feudal romance) conforms and mutates the structure of feeling of national and local belonging. We, as scholars of South Asian popular culture, are as concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media as how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, ‘Indymedia,’ etc.) does things to and in the new media. Meaning and pragmatics, therefore, are feedback looped together in the creation of new publics, new affects, and new experiences of pleasure and value. Consider, for instance, this recent pre ´cis of the emergence of value added services (VAS) in India’s booming mobile phone market. The company making these prognostications is Delhi-based one-97. ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14746681003802391 http://www.informaworld.com South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 8, No. 2, July 2010, 105–108