Introduction: Regional Platforms

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of this special issue on ‘Regional Platforms’, presenting its background, significance, purpose, and overall structure. To characterize the regional implications in platforms, we first define the concept of ‘platform’ by outlining its basic typology. We define three different types of platforms: product-technology type, content-platforms, and transaction-type. Each of the three designates a different meaning of the term platform and describes a different configuration of platforms in relation to media studies. Challenging the dominant mode of platform studies that presume a global geography for us-based examples, this special issue purposely situates our typology of platforms in regional terms. We argue that digital platforms have given rise to a sense of media regionalism and a renewed regional media geography through both transnational and transmedial processes. The five essays composing this issue are then summarized to demonstrate how the authors approach the question of the regionality of platforms.

Chinese video streaming services in the context of global platform studies

“…In a recent issue of the journal Asiascape, media scholars Marc Steinberg and Jinying Li pose a provocative argument about the implicit geography of academic research on video platforms (Steinberg & Li, 2017). Writing against a "dominant mode of platform studies that presume a global geography for US-based examples", Steinberg and Li note the tendency for American platforms to be "taken as models to describe a seemingly placeless intermediary of global (and universal) experiences" (p. 178).…”

The Platformization of Culture: Webtoon Platforms and Media Ecology in Korea and Beyond

“…Having reviewed recent attempts to define and categorize the term “platform,” Marc Steinberg and Jinying Li offer their own brief and practical tripartite typology of platforms. The three types are (1) “product-technology type platforms,” which “designate something like a computing infrastructure, the hardware basis for computational activities”; (2) “content platforms, or platforms for content,” which “are websites or app variants of what is called social media”; and (3) “transaction-type and mediation-type platforms,” which designate “something akin to the mediation-structure or intermediary that makes certain kinds of transaction possible” (Steinberg and Li 2017, 175–76) 3 . However, as Steinberg and Li also mention, this typology is not definitive, because quite a few individual platforms include features of different types of platforms.…”

The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok

“…Douyin is not owned or aligned with the trio of Chinese internet giants, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT) and neither is TikTok associated with any of the "big five" internet companies: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM). Previous studies have called for the decentralization of the US in scholarly platform debates (Steinberg & Li, 2017) and to critically evaluate the technoorientalism that surrounds Chinese tech companies and platforms (de Kloet et al, 2019). Analyzing TikTok and Douyin side-by-side is instructive for future studies to examine platformization.…”