What kind of reception has your book had in Japan?
MS: There’s definitely a good deal of interest there. I’m spending some time there this summer speaking to research groups in media studies as well as management studies and business schools.
Part of the aim of the book was to introduce a different strain of platform theory to media studies. Media studies really focuses on either hardware platforms or social media platforms, but not much on the transactional or platform theory – which comes more from economics. We in film and media studies have a lot to learn from this strand of platform theory.
Japanese economists tell a different story about the history and the ideas behind platforms. They are really important to me because so much of the language we use around this comes from North America. One of the things I do in this book is to I challenge the history of platform theory, and also the history of platforms in North America, giving some credit to the Japanese management thinkers who ended up contributing to what became today’s platform economy.
Where does film studies intersect with the business of culture?
MS: For the last decade or so there’s been a growing focus on the film industry, and industry studies is an increasingly prominent subfield in film and media studies.
The approach I take also cuts across different disciplines, including making interventions into the increasingly large field of platform studies, communication studies, and so on. There’s also a trend towards critical business studies. Film studies has a history of engagement with media and technology, offering critical approaches that can help in new contexts.
Do you have grad students working in similar areas?
MS: Yes, several in fact. I have a masters’ student, Colin Crawford, who just completed a fantastic thesis on Netflix. He did a rhetorical analysis of everything Netflix has said about themselves and how it’s changed over time. In fact he received a SSHRC grant for this.
I also have a PhD student, Jacqueline Ristola, studying how global platforms like Netflix have changed the global circulation of Anime. There are niche platforms like Crunchyroll that are big in the diffusion of anime to North Americans. Suddenly, Netflix is not only an anime distributor, it’s also a producer of anime. Netflix uses almost exclusively CGI anime. Traditionally, anime has been 2D heavy so already the original stylistic characteristics of anime are transforming through Netflix’s intervention.
A third student, Aurélie Petit, is looking at the use of anime icons as communicational media on online bulletin boards. These are just three examples, but many of my students are doing platform studies in some respect.