“Long Live Play” and “Platform Dominance, Contents Strategies”

Marc Steinberg’s presentation analyses the now-habituated watchwords of Web 2.0 hype: contents and platforms. These words arguably mark 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 (rather than global) mobilization. This presentation will examine the two halves of the platform-contents equation, exploring the geographical locatedness of the two terms’ theoretical meaning and development.