Research Proposal

• In 2007, 4% of India’s population had access to the internet. Today, in under a decade and a half, that percentage has increased to 61% (1). This rapid increase in internet access means that Indian internet users have become a new, large audience for online media. This also means that Indian internet users have the capacity to share and spread Indian media outside of the country, permeating international audiences. It is currently unclear what kind of effect internet access in India has had on international media consumption and how Indian media reaches other areas of the world. When researching the topic of internet growth in India, no research was found exploring the effects that India’s rapid digital growth may have on the future of the world, let alone the future of India. The research methods outlined in this proposal attempt to explore this area by focusing specifically on the effect India’s new, large, digital audience could have on international media consumption.
• To predict how online Indian audiences may influence international media consumption, we can look at Eastern countries that have reached higher percentages of internet access than India. For example, South Korea. South Korean media, such as Korean pop and Korean drama shows, have found audiences in the United States and other Western countries (2). Another country of interest is China. In recent years, Hollywood has produced a number of movies that cater both to Western and Chinese audiences in order to capitalize on the country’s large market for entertainment (3).
• These two countries have both digitized (made modern digital technology accessible to people) faster than India has (4, 5), so we can look at the effects that their new large audiences have had on international media. These countries have both had large impacts, but each in different ways. South Korean media, first shared online through South Korean social media, eventually made its way to other areas of the world, and South Korean stars have now become popular internationally. This shows how a country’s media can be introduced to international audiences through the internet. In China’s case, internet access has made it easier for international media to reach Chinese audiences (if it follows China’s regulations on internet content), and so media was created outside of China that catered to these audiences.
• In the future, India could have an impact similar to South Korea, China, or even a mix of both, on international media consumption. Indian media may become mainstream and/or mainstream media may attempt to cater to Indian audiences.
• The research outlined in this proposal attempts to predict Indian media’s spread to international audiences, specifically Western/English-speaking audiences, by analyzing past and present data relating to Indian media in Western/English-speaking countries, and seeing if Indian media spread is correlated to internet access among people in India. If this research is carried out, the results may predict India’s future role in international media consumption and can be used to predict the viability of future Western-made media that caters to Indian audiences. Knowing that this market is growing encourages US films to be made that appeal to Indian audiences, for example, similar to how US films are made that appeal to Chinese audiences.
• This research can be categorized into two phases of data collection. The first is compiling past figures and analyzing the success of traditional Indian media in the United States from 1950 until now. This means looking at Bollywood box office performances, Indian television ratings, and Indian music artist popularity in the United States.
• The second phase of this research is looking at social media figures in the present. This will start by compiling a list of keywords relating to Indian media (Indian actor names, movie names, names of Indian online trends, Indian foods, Indian songs, etc.) and a list of online Indian personalities. Over the course of three years, every day, data will be collected pertaining to these two categories. For the keywords, tools like Google Trends or Twitter’s API for Academic Research (6) could be used to track the popularity of these keywords and where they are being used in the world, over time. These keywords could be turned into an animated heatmap showing where in the world they are being used in order to track their reach outside of India. For the personalities, numbers like Instagram followers, Youtube views, Twitter retweets, or Patreon income could be used to track the success of the personalities. The comments under these personalities’ posts could be checked to see what percentage of comments are in Indian, in English, etc. By tracking these figures, we can see how quickly these people amass their following, and how much of that following is from outside India.
• This data will be collected every day by a program designed to do so, with maintenance and supervision provided every day up to a point where the program is deemed functional; at this point, maintenance and supervision will begin being provided twice a week instead. This program could use APIs like Twitter’s, if available, or use simple web scraping in order to collect data from webpages and put the data into a spreadsheet or database.
• Once collected, these data sets can be graphed, analyzed, and compared to other data sets collected. Correlation between data sets could suggest that the audience for Indian media is growing. These data sets can also be compared to the number of internet users in India to see if there truly is a correlation.
• Some obstacles that this research could run into come from collecting data. Most social media platforms do not provide APIs that make it simple to work with their data, meaning that other methods like web scraping will need to be used. Web scraping involves reading the HTML directly off of a webpage, which can be fragile and imprecise if a website changes its web layout.
• Another obstacle is the language barrier. Trying to understand Indian internet culture without understanding the language may be futile; it would be very difficult to find keywords to track or understand why trends change. The solution to this would be working with native Indian speakers who are familiar with the internet and Indian internet culture and finding keywords to track based on their input.
• The language barrier also has some interesting effects on the research. As mentioned before, by checking a comment section under an Indian personality’s post for comments that are not in Indian, we can quantify how far that post has spread outside of India. Looking for differences in a language like this could be very useful when analyzing the data collected.
• There are a number of research projects that could follow up on this project. A similar study could be done looking at how other countries besides English-speaking countries are affected by India’s online audience. Studies could also be done exploring how India’s internet growth could affect other aspects of life in and out of India. These studies could look at infrastructure, trade, health, and other areas that may be affected by the rise of the internet. Since India digitized so rapidly, studies could be done to see if the country will sustain any long-term negative effects of gaining access to the internet so quickly. As mentioned in the introduction, the long-term effects of India’s rapid digitization have not been researched at all.
• Possible objections to this research proposal may wonder why we would expect India to be an upcoming market in the first place. As mentioned before, 61% of India now has access to the internet (1), but that isn’t much compared to the United States’ 95% (7), for example. However, India’s total population is much larger than the United States’. The total number of internet users in India is approximately 833M as of 2021 (1), almost three times as many as the number of people with internet access in the United States (approximately 312M) (7). So, even though India has a lower total percentage of people with internet access than the United States, it has a larger number of total people with internet access than the United States. Additionally, because only 61% of Indian people currently have internet access, there is plenty of room to grow, whereas there is not much room for growth in the United States.
• Another objection might ask what the basis is for comparing internet access to media reach. Internet access is being used as an indicator of digitization. If a country is more digitized, it has better access to modern technology and its people can become more connected to other people around the world. This technology means higher quality media, and this connection means that media can spread farther internationally. In this way, internet access can show how far a country’s media can reach.
• The tasks for this study include compiling existing data for traditional media, compiling the keywords to track on social media, creating the program to collect social media data, supervising this program twice a week, and finally analyzing all of this data.

task	hr/day	timespan (weekdays)	notes
Compiling social media keywords	8	10	2 weeks
Creating the data collection program	8	25	5 weeks
Program supervision (troubleshooting program)	1	x	1 hr/day, 5 days a week
Program supervision (finished program)	0.4	780 - x	1 hr/day, 2 days a week, for 3 years
Compiling traditional media data	8	10	2 weeks
Analyzing data	8	25	5 weeks

(Note: if the above table does not show properly, view the Markdown file in Github) Link to file in Github

• Based on the above table, if we assume that x = 20 (4 weeks of troubleshooting), then we can estimate a total time of 884 hours to complete this project. This work will be split between two people
  • Person 1: Creating data collection program, troubleshooting, supervision, analyzing data
    • 524 hours
  • Person 2: Compiling social media keywords, compiling traditional media data, analyzing data
    • 360 hours
• If these two people are paid at a rate of $20/hour, then the total cost would be $17,680.
• One final cost: when compiling the social media keywords, Person 2 should work with native Indian speakers who understand Indian internet culture and trends in order to create accurate keywords. If 4 people are brought in to help with this part of the project, and they work with Person 2 for 2 hours a day for 5 days, that is a total of 40 hours. At a rate of $60 for these participants, the cost would be $2,400. This brings the total cost to $20,080, not accounting for overtime, travel costs, or other unexpected costs. The total could be rounded up to $21,000 for these costs.
• The total time span of this project is 5 weeks for Person 1 to create the data collection program and Person 2 to work with participants to compile the social media keywords and compile the traditional media data, then 3 years for data collection to run, then 5 weeks for the data to be analyzed by Person 1 and 2 together.
• With this research, it is possible to see the impact that Indian media has on Western/English-speaking audiences. The novel hypothesis is that Indian media will have a larger impact on Western audiences as the number of internet users in the country grows. If this trend is found, then Western works of media can begin catering to Indian audiences, as this influence can go both ways. This trend would also show how cultures around the world are becoming more intertwined as countries go through digitization. This study can quantify that idea and predict how it will affect people in Western countries in the future.

Bibliography (in order of appearance)

1. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (2021). ”The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators”. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/PIR_21102021_0.pdf
2. The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. (2013). United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
3. Song X (2018). Hollywood movies and China: Analysis of Hollywood globalization and relationship management in China’s cinema market. Global Media and China. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from doi:10.1177/2059436418805538
4. CNNIC (February 3, 2021). Number of internet users in China from 2008 to 2020 (in millions) [Graph]. Statista. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/265140/number-of-internet-users-in-china/
5. Kemp, Simon (18 February 2020). ”Digital 2021: South Korea”. DataReportal – Global Digital Insights.  Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-south-korea
6. Twitter API for Academic Research **(2021). Twitter.com. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/academic-research
7. Internet World Stats. (November 20, 2019). Number of internet users in the United States from 2000 to 2019 (in millions) [Graph]. Statista. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/276445/number-of-internet-users-in-the-united-states/