Indian young adults' creation of mental spaces with Hindi movie-themed Instagram memes

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the influence of Hindi films and web/drama series on Indian young adults, reflected on their use of Internet memes on Instagram. Amid the rise of videos on streaming services and social media, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, Indian movies faced a larger number of alternatives more accessible to the Internet generation. This study examines Indian young adults’ creation and consumption of Internet memes as an indicator of native Hindi films’ influence in the market. Analyses were made on a popular college meme Instagram account with 250 Internet meme posts, looking in depth into the use of visual sources from movies, and how the sources are re-interpreted and gaining relevance to the Instagram users’ narrative, under Fauconnier’s model of blending and mental spaces. Our finding signals that Hindi films are still widely accepted by the young adults, who actively connect their life experience to well-known movie scenes using Internet memes, and consequently, the Hindi movie themes transmit in the social media space and their cultural presence is strengthened.