Dr. Marc Steinberg
Marc Steinberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of the award-winning books Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and its expanded Japanese translation Why is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”? (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015), which historically situate the practices of media franchising or the media mix. 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. He is the co-editor (with Alexander Zahlten) of Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), which traces the politics and parameters of media theorization in the Japanese context, as well as a special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia on “Regional Platforms.”