Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. vi, 297 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5179-0695-5.
While focusing on Japan as the platform and contents progenitor, the thematic core of this monograph is transformative shifts in technology from the final decades of the twentieth century to now: the shift from an automobile-centric economy toward innovative tech products and consumer electronics brands; the shift from a content-is-king to a platform-is-king mentality; the shift from contents providers to contents platforms and/or mediation platforms; the shift from web-based experiences to social media applications; the shift from Japan to the United States as the epicentre of mobile technology; the shift from national to regional markets and then to the globalization of the platform; and now, the shift from ownership to a sharing economy alongside the platform business model as a variant of post-Fordism.
Amid a detailed explication of the contents-platform relationship, Marc Steinberg argues that platforms have systemically transformed market sides and society as a whole. Steinberg examines the shift from discourse about software to discourse about contents and the shift from hardware production to cultural production. Herein platforms function as both rhetorical devices and objects encompassing hardware and contents support to facilitate financial transactions and connectivity.
The Platform Economy does well to deviate from the typical configuration of the United States as the platform capitalism homeland and to highlight Japan as central to platform development and theory. Before Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, robust platform systems permeated Japan’s mediasphere and socialized Japanese consumers to pay for information like news and weather. Steinberg explores the smartphonization of the internet and the conceptualization of technology regionalism in East Asia but particularly analyzes the i-mode mobile phone service that McKinsey & Company proposed and then NTT Docomo launched in 1999. I-mode revolutionized business by fostering a symbiotic relationship between platform and contents through a cycle of dependency and consumption among key stakeholders (e.g., users, contents designers, handset makers). By 2001, Docomo was the largest Internet provider in the world, with its entire subscriber base in Japan.
This monograph investigates the “i-mode effect” resulting from users who became hooked on internet-distributed contents and paid for contents through the platform. I-mode, with curated contents à la AOL and a multi-sided market à la Nintendo, changed the contents ecosystem in Japan, the Internet landscape in Asia, and the development of the global smartphone. Beyond its position as the underappreciated protagonist in the smartphone narrative, i-mode made the way for e-commerce and start-ups in Japan and for other Japanese platforms, such as video-sharing service Niconico, and inspired the Android and iOS duopoly. The i-mode service spawned the phenomenon in which contents producers transformed into platforms themselves for other contents providers.
Steinberg avows that appreciating the i-mode effect necessitates interrogating the typology of the term contents, or kontentsu in Japanese, and understanding the history of the platform. The plurality of the semantically ambiguous contents accentuates that there is always a multiplicity of content that is media mixed. Contents encompasses media and their network effects. While contents originally referred to software and multimedia, i-mode allied contents with platforms by creating the largest market for digitally delivered contents. In this way, contents became marketable packages of cultural goods as intellectual property; these contents foster the creation of platforms. The term contents was initially localized in Japan to refer to particular kinds of Japanese media, such as manga and anime, associated with the Cool Japan initiative.
The contemporary platform economy is rooted in the history of the platform in Japan, beginning with automobile manufacture research. Japanese scholars have long written about platforms in the business context as Japanese hardware developments fostered technological change. The platform concept emerged in the “Toyotist” system in the 1970s to denote the standardization of the base elements of vehicles, a shift that reconceptualized supply chain management toward optimization. The focus shifted from making things to making mechanisms, and such platform theory migrated from East to West. Today the term platform refers to a mediator for contents diffusion, a structure for communication and social relations, and/or an intermediary for financial transactions. The contents market, the app store model, and the mediatory operations of the contemporary smartphone platform derive from i-mode.
The Platform Economy further scrutinizes contents and how platforms coordinate markets to designate the values of cultural goods in a digital world. The i-mode business model emphasized contents as commodity and engaged consumers through contents and the organization of relevant contents rather than through the technology itself. This reflected a shift in Japan from producing automobiles and the manufacture sector to generating spaces of cultural creation and the creative industries. Eventually, platform hegemony shifted from telecom to OS providers and toward US media imperialism via platform, interface, contents, and distribution. This monograph concludes by analyzing the i-mode effect on the platformization of chat apps (e.g., LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat) and their potential to displace Android and iOS.
Steinberg intersects management theory with media studies and critical theory to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of how Japan’s mobile technology provided a foundation for global smartphone-enabled commerce but essentially removed Japan from the equation. Although the definitions therein are somewhat lengthy to comprise historical, discursive, and geographical contexts, the monograph is thorough and eloquent in including tangential yet relevant descriptions such as the shift from narrative marketing to contents marketing. The author applies government white papers, interviews with key individuals, and scholarly literature to build an argument that “platforms beget contents that in turn beget platforms” (11).
The Platform Economy will engage those interested in the management of social, economic, and cultural relations by means of platform mediation. This monograph will also be of interest to those concerned with platform capitalism and the rise of the platform-mediated commercial internet in various global markets. The Platform Economy provides a case to consider Japan’s cultural and economic nationalism through media conglomeration and discourse about media, especially as Japan has struggled to rebrand and advance its national image in the twenty-first century. Finally, this monograph leaves readers to ponder the implications of the hegemonic shift in platform technology from Japan to the United States.
Lindsey M. Bier
University of Southern California, Los Angeles