Taking the historical example of the emporium, this article 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 economic exchanges are being aggregated within portals that allow value capture at the transactional level. By emphasizing the evolutionary processes at work in the platform economy, this article also seeks to illustrate how the digital economy is shaped by pathways established within the distinctive economics of media systems.
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Adrian Athique (2019) studied this question.