Digital Platforms and Play:
Platform Dominance, Contents Strategies
by Marc Steinberg
Abstract: Contents and platforms are the now-habituated watchwords of Web 2.0 hype. But they are also the dividing lines between geographically divergent responses to Web 2.0 enabled commerce. Having given up the 1990s emphasis on the production of media content (under the slogan “content is king”), North American companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon now fight for global platform dominance. Perhaps not coincidentally North America is also the site for the most vibrant theorization of the platform as a new media form that quite explicitly displaces the term “medium” itself. South Korea and Japan, on the other hand, have increasingly embraced the loanword “contents” as the new catch-all term for entertainment industry-driven intellectual property. They have also been the sites of correspondingly intense discussions about the nature of contents, and strategies of its regional (more than global) mobilization. Marc Steinberg’s presentation will examine the two halves of the platform-contents equation, and the geographical locatedness of the two terms’ theoretical meaning and development.
Marc Steinberg is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. His work examines the visual culture and industry discourse of media convergence in Japan and, increasingly, South Korea. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which he is currently editing, revising and expanding for Japanese translation.
What? Lecture
Where? TBA
When? Feb 7, 16h00
