A Genesis of the Platform Concept: I-Mode and Platform Theory in Japan

Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (2017) 184-208 brill.com/dias A Genesis of the Platform Concept: i-mode and Platform Theory in Japan Marc Steinberg Associate professor of film studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada [email protected] Abstract Where does platform theory come from? What consequences does it have? This article offers one set of answers to these questions by looking at a body of platform theory that developed in Japan in the 1990s and arguably affected the rollout of internet- enabled mobile phones that were, in turn, models for the iPhone and Android phones several years later. Putting this body of theory in dialogue with managerial and economic theory of the platform from France and the United States, this article suggests an earlier genealogy of platform theory, a development that had immediate and long- lasting consequences for the contemporary media landscape. Keywords i-mode – intermediary – Japan – mobile media – platform studies – platform theory Where geographically do platforms come from? If we had only the scholarship on platforms to guide us in answering this question, we would be forgiven for thinking that platforms were an invention of Silicon Valley, born as distribution channels or financial structures to remediate global content. To some degree, this is borne out by the dominant ‘platforms’ of the day: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft – the list can go on and on before we have to leave the shores of the American West Coast. North America and Silicon Valley, in particular, are often the focal points of digital research and platform studies; they are also the site where many of the globally dominant platforms originate. This situation gives rise to what Dal Yong Jin aptly terms ‘platform imperialism’. With this felicitous phrase, Jin rightly © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/��4�3��-��Downloaded340077 from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:03:29PM via free access A Genesis Of The Platform Concept 185 suggests the importance of returning to political economy and theories of imperialism – both cultural and political – to grasp the power of platforms with American origins that are reshaping our world. Jin (2013: 154) writes: Accepting platforms as digital media intermediaries, the idea of platform imperialism refers to an asymmetrical relationship of interdependence between the West, primarily the U.S., and many developing powers – of course, including transnational corporations.… Characterized in part by unequal technological exchanges and therefore capital flows, the current state of platform development implies a technological domination of U.S.-based companies that have greatly influenced the majority of people and countries.1 Jin’s argument is indisputable; US-based companies have more of a reach than ever before; we need only look at the global market share of Android and iOS, which together had a 99 per cent share of the worldwide smartphone market in 2016 (IDC 2016). Platform imperialism operates at the level of epistemology as well as practice, shaping the objects that scholars privilege as platforms to be studied. This is abetted by the fact that much of the most visible platform research and theory tends to come out of North American or European institutions, often choosing American platforms as their object of study (Plantin et al. 2016).2 This is true, for instance, in recent popular business books on platforms such as Platform Revolution and Matchmakers, as well as the media studies work on platforms from YouTube and Facebook (Evans 2016; Parker et al. 2016; Snickars & Vonderau 2009; Tryon 2013). Some of this work is methodologically inspirational – such as Anne Helmond’s (2015) rigorous work on the ‘platformi- zation of the Web’ or Nieborg’s (2015) work on social games – yet most of it still adheres to a formula in which American platforms are the focus of discus- sion. One exception to this is found in the platform studies book series that Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort edit for MIT Press, a series which focuses explicitly on programmable platforms, in particular game platforms. The series includes attention to Japanese gaming consoles, such as Nintendo’s NES and its Wii, yet the books’ manner of dealing with Japan tends to focus on the hardware – a natural outcome of the series’ own methodological program – and somewhat 1 Jin (2015) elaborates on the concept further in Digital Platforms, Imperialism, and Political Culture. 2 For a recent account of platform epistemology that indirectly corroborates this claim, even as it advances its own, quite interesting research agenda, see Plantin et al. (2016). Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (2017) 184-208 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:03:29PM via free access 186 Steinberg less on the cultural or economic aspects of Japanese platforms, effectively re- inforcing a view of Japan as a hardware-producing country (Altice 2015; Jones & Thiruvathukal 2012). This article examines a slightly earlier historical moment – the 1990s and early 2000s – in order to offer a different account of platforms, one that suggests an alternative genealogy for both empirical platforms and platforms theory. Here we take up a very specific kind of platform – what has been called ‘transaction-type or mediation-type platforms’ (the meaning of which I will come to in a moment) – and tell a very different story of its development. The theoretical development of mediation-type platforms is almost always linked to two sets of French and American researchers, working in the early years of the twenty-first century. However, as I argue here, this mediation-type platform theory did not (only) originate with French and American management or economics researchers, as is often presumed to be the case. Rather, one of the points of genesis of this mode of platform thinking is found in the work of Japanese management thinkers writing in the mid- to late 1990s. Note that here and in my title I use the indefinite article ‘a’ to acknowledge that this is one of the genesis sites, even as I go on to suggest that it is arguably the site where it first emerges in this form. That Japan is one of the sites of genesis for this branch of platform theory matters in part because it challenges the direc- tionality of theory but also because this model of understanding the platform had an immediate impact on the formation of one of the ur-platforms of our day: Docomo’s i-mode, a mobile internet project that is widely credited as the source of inspiration for Android and iOS and was one of the first widely dif- fused internet-enabled phones in the world (Kawakami 2015; Natsuno 2011). This article thereby resists platform imperialism’s empirical and epistemo- logical focus on the United States as the epicentre of platform research and platform development. There is no question that platforms are the dominant forms of our time and that many of the dominant platforms are located in the United States. This article does, however, dispute the narratives of its development and agrees with many of the other articles in this issue that we need to adopt a distinctly regional view of the platform as an object and as an episte- mological framework. This is particularly the case in the wake of the development in China, South Korea, and Japan of hardware and software platforms. The first part of this article deals with Japanese platform theory in the 1990s and its parallels to platform theory in management and economics with which we tend to be more familiar in the English-language context, here taking quite seriously work on the fringes of what Alan Liu (2004: 16) has called ‘the im- mensely influential and best-selling works of fiction-blended-with-realism – let us loosely call them “novels” – by the Victorian sages of our time: “management Asiascape: DigitalDownloaded Asia from 4 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2017) 184-208 02:03:29PM via free access A Genesis Of The Platform Concept 187 gurus”.’ Many of the authors I read are more scholars than gurus, yet, much as Liu (2004: 414n48) turns to management writing for a window onto theoriza- tions of knowledge work and the ‘ways of articulating (and finessing) the real that management theory has made its business’, my reading of management theory work here aims to clarify the theory of platforms that dominates business practice today. The second part of this article – albeit much briefer than the first section and in need of further elaboration elsewhere – engages with Japanese forays into the mobile internet. These forays created the precursor to the smartphone and thereby formatted the dominant platform experience of today. Combined, this discursive and practical approach allows platform studies to gain a regional perspective, because the development of the i-mode had knock-on effects, on the one hand, on the development of the South Korean telephone industry and, on the other hand, on the East Asian mobile gaming market, which continues to produce some of the leading games globally, draw- ing on the experience and lessons drawn from the i-mode by South Korean and Chinese companies in particular. This account has regional implications in two senses: (1) the specificity to a region of platform development outside the United States, focusing on Japan in particular; (2) the specifically East Asian regional development of platform ecologies that this article mentions in the conclusion. The combined theoretical and technical approaches contrast with the often Euro-American focus of media theory, as found, for instance, in John Guillory’s (2010) account of the ‘Genesis of the Media Concept’ – from which this article borrows its title – and the important early work on platforms by Tarleton Gillespie (2010) in his ‘Politics of Platforms’ essay.

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