Consuming cringe: A sensorial understanding of humorous men on Instagram.

Abstract

The Indian social media has seen a gradual rise in cringe content post-2016, as access to the internet rapidly increased with the introduction of Jio services in the broader context of technonationalism in India. This position paper focuses on the emergent "humorous masculinity" in the form of viral meme content on Instagram Reels after the ban of TikTok in India post-Indo-China border tensions. This paper hopes to examine how marginalized content creators like Puneet Kumar (Puneet Superstar on Instagram) are resisting the segregated online space that mirrors Indian society by using humor in an ironic and subversive manner. To understand the perspectives of cringe culture in India, this paper will use the Bourdieusian framework [9] of digital capital and analyze content following Sarah Pink’s interventions in the sensorial digital ethnography [13] within a broad framework of the theory of senses.