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Marc Steinberg

Professor, Film Studies

Department: Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema

Faculty: Fine Arts


Marc Steinberg
Phone: (514) 848-2424 ext. 8728
Email: marc.steinberg@concordia.ca
Website(s): The Platform Lab

Expertise:

anime, Japanese culture, digital platforms, digital culture, animation, manga, platforms and culture, platform business

Language(s) spoken:

English, French, Japanese

Professional associations:

PhD


 
Marc Steinberg's research focuses explores the impact of digital platforms on media and media industries today, particularly focusing on the role of streaming platforms like Netflix in mediating cultural production and experience. Previous research is in animation studies, focusing on anime's media industries and the "media mix."

He is author of the award-winning book
 Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 2012) which historically situates the practices of merchandising or the media mix in relation to the anime industry. Anime's Media Mix and its expanded Japanese translation Why is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”? (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015), won the ITRA-BTHA Book Prize (Senior Prize) from the International Toy Research Association (2014), and the Japan Society for Animation Studies Book Prize (2015).

His second monograph, The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), tracks the platform-led transformation of film,media, and Internet cultures. Offering a comparative study of platformization with a focus on Japan as the key site for global platformization,the book systematically examines the managerial, medial, and social functions of platform theories and platform practices.


Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), co-edited with Alexander Zahlten, traces the politics and parameters of media theorization in the Japanese context.

 

He is currently at work on three different projects. The first examines the effect of platforms, apps and "super apps" have on cultural production and media organization. This includes the role of "super apps" in Asia. His articles "LINE as Super App: Platformization in East Asia" and "Media Power in Digital Asia: Super Apps and Megacorps" are two examples of this work, which continues as part of a group grant research digital transactions and digital money across Asia.


The second, maps the intersection of management theory and just-in-time logistical systems, as well as theories of platform capitalism. This has resulted in several publications: Media and Management (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), an open access book co-authored with Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julie Yujie Chen and Melissa Gregg; and “From Automobile Capitalism to Platform Capitalism: Toyotism as a Prehistory of the Digital Economy”published in Organization Studies. More recently, the co-authored "Platform Capitalisms and Platform Cultures" argues for the need to pluralize our concept of platform capitalism in order to account for multiplicity of state-capital-culture relations.


The third project analyzes the role of convenience in the platform economy, and especially the role of convenience as an aesthetic or feeling that works as a lure to platforms. This includes tracking the role of the Japanese convenience store as a key site for producing many aspects of digital convenience experienced globally today. The forms part of a Volkswagen Foundation group grant exploring Smartness as Wealth.


He is also the director of The Platform Lab, a research group dedicated to the study of platforms.


He welcomes supervisees on topics in platform studies, hardware histories, media industry studies, animation studies, social media, streaming platforms, and media retail.

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