This article explores the automotive lineage and manufacturing origins of platforms. Challenging prevailing assumptions that the platform is a digital artefact, and platform capitalism a new era, this article traces crucial elements of platform capitalism to Toyotist automobile manufacture in order to rethink the relationship between technology and organization. Arguing that the very terminology and industry applications of the ‘platform’ emerge from the automobile industry over the course of the 20th century, this article cautions against the uncritical adoption of epochal paradigms, or assumptions that new technologies require new organizational forms. By parsing the platform into two types, the stack and the intermediary, this article demonstrates how the platform concept and data-driven production practice both develop out of the Toyota Production System in particular, and American and Japanese analyses of it. Toyotism, we show, is the unseen industrial and epistemological background against which the platform economy plays out. In making this case, this article highlights the crucial continuities between the data intensive production of companies like Uber and Amazon – emblematic of digital platform capitalism – and the organizational paradigms of the automobile industry. At a moment when the automobile returns to prominence amidst platforms such as Uber, Didi Chuxing, or Waymo, and as we find tech companies turning to automobile manufacturing, this automotive lineage of the platform offers a crucial reminder of the automotive origins of what we now call platform capitalism.

This article examines the transformative effects of platforms on cultural production through an analysis of the LINE “super app.” Super apps are apps that do-everything; mega-platforms unto themselves. They are particularly prevalent in East Asia. Like China’s WeChat or South Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s LINE has evolved from a single purpose chat app to the do-everything platform for everyday cultural and economic activities. It is also the very reason for the global proliferation of stickers or large-size emoji in other chat apps, from Apple’s iMessage to Facebook’s Messenger to Tencent’s WeChat. This article offers a close examination of LINE to highlight and theorize the process of the “platformization of cultural production.” To do so, it traces Japan’s longer history of platforms going back to the i-mode mobile platform launched in 1999, and examines LINE’s regionally specific sticker-oriented strategies in East Asia. With a focus on the entrepreneurial work of sticker designers as cultural producers, this article also mobilizes LINE to both highlight the specificities of this platform and contest the excessive attention paid to platforms from Silicon Valley, or, at best, their Chinese counterparts. LINE and the regional convergences of super apps in East Asia are a potent reminder of the need to analyze platforms outside of the bi-polar hegemony of the United States versus Chinese tech world—which increasingly frames journalistic discourse and academic research—and of the need to attend to the historical and regional particularities of platforms and their cultural impacts.

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.

This article contrasts the different economies of motion found in cinema and animation, and explores the particular economy of movement and libidinal investment that accompanies Japanese anime, paying close attention to the first anime TV series, Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atomu). Metz and Lyotard argue that cinema generates an impression of reality through its particular economy of motion. Cel animation, in contrast, relies on a different economy of motion. This is especially the case in the specific kind of limited animation found in Japanese anime. This article focuses on the specificities of this kind of animated movement (particularly its emphasis on stillness), and the way Astroboy relied on commodity serialization to generate a particularly immersive image environment - one that set the stage for what is now known as ‘anime’.

‘Designer toys’ or ‘urban vinyl’ offer themselves as a fascinating site of resistance to the contemporary circulation of images and things. This article provides an introduction to the field of designer toys and argues that the field may be understood to be a materially situated critique of the commercial practice of character merchandising. Beginning with a description of the logic of character merchandising, this article goes on to demonstrate how designer toys critically and creatively transform some of the fundamental tenets of this practice, advancing a critique of character merchandising via the material objects themselves. In this age of image circulation, the case of the designer toy demonstrates how material artefacts can themselves become significant sites of critique.