Review of Marc Steinberg's The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet

摘要

Recently, there has been much bemoaning in academic circles about the shift in the Internet Architecture from the open-ended networks model to the walled-garden style platforms. The near global domination of platforms like Netflix and Amazon and the pervasive popularity of Google's Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS operating systems can at times make it seem like every idea and technology associated with the platform concept has been hatched in the Silicon Valley. Marc Steinberg deftly argues in his new book The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Society that neither has the history of Internet always been about rhizomatic networks, and nor has the Silicon Valley been the sole arbiter of attaching meanings and metaphors to platforms. Steinberg asks the readers of his book to revisit the Japanese mobile web experience of late 1990s and early 2000s and argues this was a formative moment in platformization because many aspects of this experience are having an impact in the way we think about apps (applications) and platforms (purattofomu in Japanese) in our contemporary mobile phone cultures.