gem lab events
mediation workshop
2025
Workshop
The Mediation Workshop explores the critical role of mediation in the constitution of the present. Beyond familiar notions of coming in between (a set of given terms or points of reference), we invite participants to consider the consequences of giving agency to media and to processes of mediation. In short, how do media intervene in, enliven or suture social and political forms? And how might problems of emergence, circulation, and relation help us to recast contemporary media theory’s implicit focus on a sliver of life in Euro-American cities? Our aim is at once to recalibrate ongoing fascinations with new technologies, geographies of value, and teleological histories anchored in the Global North, and to gather new insights, terms, and ecologies for theorizing global media.
*The workshop is supported by the GEM Lab and the Center for Transcultural Studies
Schedule
May 1st
9:45am: Welcome + Coffee
10:15am - 12:00pm: Panel I: Emergence
Moderator: Bishnupriya Ghosh
Bhaskar Sarkar, "The Nation-form as Media Object"
Marc Steinberg, “SoftBank Mediation Theory”
Joshua Neves, “Blur”
12:00pm - 1:15pm: Lunch
1:15pm - 3:00pm: Panel II: Circulation
Moderator: Farah Atoui
Iuliia Glushneva, “Red Videotapes: The Soviet Origins of Home Video and Socialist Epistemologies of Media Circulation”
Michelle Cho, “Out of Time”: South Korea's New Retro Aesthetics
Bishnupriya Ghosh, "Mediating Gaza: on the Limits of Liveness"
3:00pm - 3:15pm - Break
3:15pm - 5:00pm: Panel III: Ecology
Moderator: Yuriko Furuhata
Thomas Lamarre, “Blue-Green Media: Critical Ecology for Media Studies”
Mehak Sawhney, “Media and the Planetary”
May 2nd
10:00am - Welcome + Coffee
10:15am - 12:00pm: Panel V: Relation
Moderator: Michelle Cho
Ani Maitra, “Enjoyment through (parts of) the other, or “the invisible hand (job)” of platform capitalism”
Matthias Mushinski, “Toward a Theory of Cinematic Detachment; or the beauty of John Coltrane”
Christine Goding-Doty, "Slime, So Satisfying"
12:00pm - 1:15pm - Lunch
1:15pm - 3:00pm: Panel IV: Limits
Moderator: Bhaskar Sarkar
Cassandra Guan, “Re-Elaborating the Concept of Plasticity for a Marxist Media Theory”
Jordan Kinder, “Mediating the Unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipeline: Infrastructure, Subsumption, Transition”
Burc Kostem, “Mediating Finitude: Towards a Figural Account of Limits”
3:00pm - 3:15pm - Break
3:15pm - 5:00pm: Panel VI - Closing discussion/planning
Moderator: Joshua Neves
Bios & Abstracts
Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of Korean Media and Popular Culture at the University of Toronto. She is co-editor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader and Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea and author of the forthcoming book Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema.
“Out of Time”: South Korea's New Retro Aesthetics
Retro trends are a perennial feature of popular media cultures across the globe. In the contemporary moment, however, the trend seems mainly to signify a desire for pre-internet sociality and selfhood, condensing the late 20th century’s media images and material culture into a portal to a speculative fantasy of comfort and middle class abundance. In South Korea, nostalgia for 20th century styles and subjectivities permeate every domain of popular entertainment culture, centering in particular the vibes and images of transpacific luxury and leisure connoted by Japanese City Pop, which reached its heyday in the “Bubble-era” 1980s—the period of high economic growth that preceded Japan’s prolonged, recessionary 1990s. I examine South Korea’s “new retro” (aka “newtro”) aesthetics through the transnational revival of City Pop, through its remix in internet genres like vaporwave and future funk, or what has now coalesced as “YouTube-core.” Unpacking newtro’s multiple platform genealogies to decode its fantasy of ‘80s luxury, I connect South Korean new retro to the transmedia domains of City Pop and their citation by Canadian pop artist the Weeknd in his music video “Out of Time.” I’ll argue that the aesthetics and sensoria of new retro illuminate the social impacts and ideological effects of contemporary parasocial engagement, to suggest that retro aesthetics today serve as a visible trace of global media entanglements of human and algorithmic agency.
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media cultures, environmental media, and critical public health studies in English and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her early writings on global media cultures include When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) while her current research on media and risk is published in the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and in The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).
Mediating Gaza: On the Limits of Liveness
This paper focuses on audiovisual “video fragments” that rattle around in our social media echo chambers, leaking into mainstream news on occasion. Their abundance intimidates analytic habits of ordering and classification: Are these fragments “documentary practice”? Do they double as raw news footage in the face of information blackouts? Are they archival inscriptions of the Nakba? These questions swirl around several “accidental documentarians”—Plestia Alaquad, Motaz Azaiza, and Bisan Owda—who are actant-witnesses bearing considerable catastrophic risk in a war with the highest number of causalities for journalists ever. This “live” news from Gaza arriving as video posts have been key to the global-popular emergence of solidarity against the Israeli occupation. I will focus on liveness, a phenomenon with a time-honored media history, as a constitutive element of the global-popular mobilizations against regime-made catastrophes. I hope to examine the conceptual efficacy of liveness (and media-theoretical cognates such as “ambience” and “apprehension”) to probe the difficult politics of witnessing distant suffering.
Iuliia Glushneva is a media scholar specializing in transnational economies and cultures surrounding small screens, from television and videotape to streaming platforms. She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). She is working on her first book manuscript, Between Salon and Bazaar: The Disrupted History of Home Video Under Socialism.
Red Videotapes: The Soviet Origins of Home Video and Socialist Epistemologies of Media Circulation
“The beginning of home video can be put into rhyme: Boris was a scientist/His last name can’t be said/Filed a patent—here’s a twist/The VCR is Red,” the US magazine Video Review humorously proclaimed in 1991. Published to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the introduction of the VHS-based consumer VCR (videocassette recorder) in Japan in 1976, the special issue credited Boris Rcheuli, a Soviet-Georgian physicist, as the inventor of video. His machine for transferring television signals onto magnetic tape, designed in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution, was among the earliest models for analog video recording and playback. Indicative of the link between video’s origins and the Soviet era, the story of the ‘Red’ VCR, however, has largely faded into obscurity, eclipsed by fragmentary, predominantly Anglophone, accounts that associate video with socialism’s end. From the late 1980s onward, the image of socialist video engineer and institutional innovation was gradually sidelined. Instead, a different figure emerged—the socialist video smuggler and pirate, an agent of rampant informal trade in foreign VCRs and tapes with the pre-recorded ‘First World’ entertainment and a crucial contributor to the erosion of media landscape distinctive of the Soviet Union, and the ‘Second World’ more broadly. For classical media thinkers, from Manuel Castells and Zygmunt Bauman to Régis Debray, state socialism as such appeared fundamentally at odds with the emerging cultural economy epitomized by videocassette—one that was increasingly dispersed, mobile, and privatized and that marked a shift from a production-centric to a circulation-based model. In this view, socialism seemed locked into a centralized, static, and autarkic order, losing relevance locally and globally as a non-viable system.
Exploring the intertwined histories of video and socialism, this paper complicates and reassesses this narrative. Tracing the rise of videotape industry in the Soviet Union back to the late 1950s, it reveals alternative origins of the medium within socialist scientific visions, politics of internationalism and access, and notions of selfhood. Furthermore, by examining the Soviet exhibition culture of video parlours, the paper suggests that, paradoxically, it was the efficacy, not the failure, of socialist infrastructures and economies of circulation that enabled videotape to evolve into a principal means of screen distribution by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. By positioning the Soviet case as an entry point into the eclectic histories of global video cultures, this paper also invites a broader reconsideration of how circulation, as a force that mediates knowledge, desire, and reception, operates beyond the conventional Euro-Atlantic frameworks of media exchange.
Christine Goding-Doty is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media in the Department of Culture and Media at The New School where she teaches courses on the intersection of colonialism, whiteness, and digital media. Her public-facing scholarship has appeared in venues such as the Monday Art Journal, the LA Review of Books, and the podcast “Give Theory A Chance” with the Society Pages. She is currently at work on her book manuscript, Virtually White, which offers a theory of whiteness, drawing from affect and postcolonial theory, to chart the rise of digitized performances of white supremacy across social media, from the memetic practices of the alt-right to the fetishization of frontier in tween tumblrs.
Slime, So Satisfying
This paper theorizes the synesthetic sensorium of “oddly satisfying" videos circulating on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Looking particularly at slime videos, I read the genre as a kind of worlding mechanism, that generates new networks of soothing and sensation. These videos establish and then habituate associations of pleasure with the excesses of non-nutritive consumption, the production of polymers in slimes and foams, and a reformulated fetish of infinite capitalist accumulation in the form of the looping video and infinite scroll. What the videos offer in the end is not satisfaction. Rather, they furnish the experience of an untethered and unending present—a mode of selective affectability that distills that which is deemed “oddly satisfying” from its material conditions or from the consequences of its production that might be abrasive, destructive, or threatening. I consider this sanitizing function of the oddly satisfying in a colonial history of settler attachments.
Cassandra Xin Guan 关昕 is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and an affiliated faculty at the Center for East Asian Studies. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology from 2022-2024 and received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Her writing has been published in October, Screen, Film-Philosophy, World Picture, Parapraxis, and Critical Inquiry. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, called “Maladaptive Media: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility,” while simultaneously developing a second book project on the dialectic of mass mobilization and demobilization in Chinese state media.
Re-Elaborating the Concept of Plasticity for a Marxist Media Theory
Amid the revival of Marxian frameworks in media studies, the categories of labor and value have prevailed in scholarly accounts of industrial practice (Dootson, Ahern, Lovejoy), environmental politics (Pringle, Wood, Burc), resource extraction (Jaikumar, Grieveson, Jacobson), and infrastructural systems (Hu, Starosielski, Park). In this paper, I draw attention to the dialectical critique of materialism that young Marx and Engel developed in relation to the post-Hegelian philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach as they sought to establish a philosophical foundation for revolutionary social practice. The issues raised by Marx in the notes that became “Theses on Feuerbach” complicate attempts to invoke the intellectual authority of Marxism for a straight-forwardly materialist account of media, because Marx emphatically rebukes the kind of materialism that locates reality in an objective sensuous realm. Instead, he traces a dialectical process of exchange between “the changing of circumstances” and “human activity or self-changing” that reveals the reality of human essence as “an ensemble of social relations,” and identifies the coincidence of the two non-identical processes of development as “revolutionary practice.” This surprising definition complicates the critique of Marxism as a form of humanism that retains an anthropocentric view of action to the neglect of the agency of non-human forces (Latour, Bennet, Grosz). My reading of Marx and Engels challenges the received view of Marxism by both its detectors and would-be intellectual heirs as an account of human agency in the creation of value. I present Marx as an actor-network theorist before the fact who offers media theory a dialectical materialism that bridges the gap between subjectivity and objectivity. Moreover, I try to show on the basis of Engel’s commentary in “Materialism” that the biological concept of “plasticity” links the epistemological project of Marx and Engel to contemporary forms of new materialist thought, therefore re-elaborating the concept of plasticity for a Marxist media theory.
Jordan B. Kinder is a media studies and environmental humanities scholar from what is now called northern British Columbia. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Mediating the Unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipeline: Infrastructure, Subsumption, Transition
This paper will flashback to a watershed moment in Canadian infrastructural history: the unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. After two consortiums made proposals in the early 1970s, the federal government commissioned an inquiry into their social, environmental, and economic impacts. The Inquiry was unprecedented: it was not only held in urban centres, but 35 primarily Indigenous communities as well. Filmed by CBC in its entirety, coverage was aired to southern audiences, drawing national attention to the lifeways of the North. Drawing on archival research and approaching the pipeline proposals through a media ecological framework and the Inquiry itself as a media infrastructure, the paper will explore the mediation of energetic, infrastructural, and environmental futures.
Burç Köstem is a researcher whose work is situated in the intersection of cultural studies, political ecology, and media studies. He is interested in affect, infrastructure, waste, value, urban politics, and critiques of political economy. His book project, Figuring Limitation: Art, Ecology and Infrastructure in Istanbul is based on fieldwork in the peripheries of urban İstanbul and investigates the cultural politics of environmental limitation. Burç’s work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Politics and Rethinking Marxism. He has received his PhD in Communication Studies from McGill and is currently at the USC Society of Fellows.
Mediating Finitude: Towards a Figural Account of Limits
Much of contemporary ecological discourse seems to be shaped by a concern around planetary finitude. The image of the earth as inherently limited (“There is no Planet B!”) and its resources finite, frames much of both the contemporary academic discourse and the social imaginary around climate catastrophe. Yet this discussion leaves us with a strange conundrum. On the one hand environmental limits are not written in the heavens. Limits do not work on environmental politics through moral exhortation, like a stern authority hemming us in. On the other hand, it would be hard to claim limits are “socially constructed”, in a capitalist society that governs ecologies, bodies and desires always towards the goal of first proposing and then overcoming limits. Having outlined this conundrum, I end by proposing alternative figurations of limits that instead emerge from the experiences of concrete environmental struggles.
Thomas Lamarre teaches at the University of Chicago in Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization. His current projects build new connections between media studies and environmental humanities. A forthcoming collection coedited with Jody Berland, Digital Animalities: The Mediation of Animal Life in Ecopolitical Times, explores the digital mediation of animal life in context of climate breakdown. Green Heresies: Critical Ecology and Plant Studies is a research initiative that engages with ecological approaches to intelligence emerging across AI research and plant sciences. Half Life: Radiation and Animation centers the physics of animation to rethink the agency of radioactivity in the era of ongoing global nuclear disasters.
Blue-Green Media: Critical Ecology for Media Studies
With an emphasis on “blue media” (media studies of oceans), this paper focuses on the challenges that ecological thinking continues to pose for media studies. Although the term ecology is frequently evoked in media studies, it is evoked in ways that largely avoid the conceptual challenges of thinking ecologically due to the tendency to subordinate biological systems to physical systems. Looking at four areas in which media studies have grappled with ecological questions (elemental media, environmental media, media ecology, ecological critique), I aim to tease out a critical ecology for media studies. The guiding question is, why is the ocean blue?
Ani Maitra is associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. He teaches and writes at the intersections of global media, postcolonial, and gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern U Press, 2020). His other publications include essays in edited volumes and in journals like Camera Obscura, Continuum, differences, and Film Quarterly. He is currently working on a book project on contemporary queer Asian cinemas.
Enjoyment through (parts of) the other, or “the invisible hand (job)” of platform capitalism
This talk examines the mediated production of libidinal enjoyment under digital capitalism, focusing on the role of sexual/ized enjoyment on social media. Through an analysis of technical features and users’ practices across distinct platforms–an adult chat site (Flingster), a messaging app (Snapchat), and a live-streaming service (DouYu)–I examine the ways in which digital mediations intensify socially discriminatory erotic fetishizations of the self and the other. Without ignoring the distinct geopolitical and cultural environments that we navigate as users of social media, I focus on the connection between such fetishisms and our unrelenting dopaminergic “craving” for enjoyment, often without a “consummatory” pleasure. Our freedoms and cravings to enjoy the (digitized) other-as-fetish, I argue, drives platform capitalism, in both its “licit” and “illicit” forms.
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University. He is co-author (with Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) of Technopharmacology (Minnesota University Press / Meson Press, 2022), author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020), co-editor (with Marc Steinberg) of In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Institute of Network Cultures, 2024) and co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017). His work is published in Media Theory, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Discourse, Culture Machine, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Sarai, The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, among others.
Blur
[coming soon]
Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at McGill University, and an incoming Assistant Professor of Environmental Media at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include sound and media studies, surveillance studies, and environmental humanities. Her dissertation and book project, Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean, explores the territorial politics of underwater acoustic sensing in postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean. Her published and forthcoming work appears in Media, Culture & Society, Cultural Studies, Discourse, Kalfou, and Disclaimer, among other platforms.
Media and the Planetary
This presentation will focus on the technological history and institutional afterlife of the first International Indian Ocean Expedition that took place between 1959 and 1965 during the Cold War. It will draw linkages between the seemingly disparate phenomena of mid-twentieth century oceanographic expeditions in the Indian Ocean and coastal Indigenous dispossession in contemporary Mumbai. A media historical study of oceanography helps reflect on the construction of the ‘planetary’ as an idea that intersects with its conceptual cognates of the world, international, and global, as well as the local. This presentation thereby responds to the growing valence of the ‘planetary’ as a conceptual framework in environmental media studies and the environmental humanities more broadly.
Matthias Mushinski is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University where his research experiments with ways of increasing our susceptibility to Black music. He is primarily concerned with cinema’s ontological consequences, which cause him to perpetually contemplate the distinction—or lack thereof—between montage and ensemble. He most recently presented his research at the 2024 Guelph Jazz Festival, and in 2020 he completed a curatorial residency hosted by the Dakar-based arts organization RAW Material Company where he studied under the direction of Linda Goode Bryant, Arthur Jafa, Louis Massiah, Gudskul, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng, and Marie Hélène Pereira. His writing has been featured in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
Toward a Theory of Cinematic Detachment; or the Beauty of John Coltrane
This presentation offers a sustained engagement with Amiri Baraka’s liner notes for the album Live at Birdland (1964) by John Coltrane. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate how Baraka’s reflection on the track “Alabama” enacts a form of cinematic detachment that refuses the formulation of racial violence as a precondition for the beauty of Black music. My hope is that such thinking may serve as a commitment to Kara Keeling’s inaugural provocation that insufficient attention has been paid to “the historical coincidence between the invention of cinema… and W.E.B. Du Bois’s prescient 1903 statement that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’”—that the problem of the colour line is, and perhaps always will be, a problem of the cinematic. Of key interest throughout is how montage organizes thought. Or, more precisely, I reluctantly concede that cinematic perception precedes thought in a manner that might make thinking without cinema impossible. Thus, what I am after, and what I sense in Baraka’s liner notes, is something like an illicit invocation of the cut that the cinematic does not permit, but no less makes possible.
Rafico Ruiz is the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His work explores settler colonialism and infrastructure in the circumpolar world, as well as contemporary environmental issues related to the phase states of ice. Ruiz is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, and the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics, both published by Duke University Press in 2021. He also recently co-edited with Jih-Fei Cheng and Bharat Venkat a special issue of History + Technology on the concept of ‘reservoir.’
Ikiaqqijjut (‘travelling through layers’): The Angiqatigingniq Internet Network and the Promise of Extraction in Mary River, Nunavut
The Digital Indigenous Democracy (DID) network was launched in 2012 by Isuma TV. The network was created by Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk, the latter best known as the director of Atanarjuat (2001). The DID is a networked media platform designed to foster Inuit-forms of consensus building in the Arctic, though largely operating at present only in Nunavut. The project was launched in response to an Environmental Review (ER) of the then proposed Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation mine site at Mary River in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, which, after its approval, became one of the largest open-pit iron ore mines in the world. In order to facilitate the timely and transparent undertaking of the ER and the necessary sharing of information that this entailed amongst the communities affected by the mine, Isuma launched the DID as part of its Angiqatigingniq Internet Network (AIN), a media platform operating across community radio, local television, DIY filmmaking, and two-way high-speed Internet. With typically low and costly speeds of broadband access in the majority of these communities, DID installed media players in each of the seven communities impacted by the ER that then streamed Inuktitut-language Isuma TV programs, facilitated the uploading of user-generated content, and, across its other media platforms, informed the collective process of community consultation. The ultimate goal of the consensus process was a multimedia Human Rights Impact Assessment that would determine, in part, the costs and benefits of the Baffinland mine to and for the residents in the communities around Mary River. This research project revisits the Digital Indigenous Democracy network, and in particular the infrastructural deployment of the AIN, to foreground how Nunaviummiut are navigating and reclaiming Ikiaqqijjut (‘travelling through layers’/ the Internet) as a space of sovereignty premised on consensus building and infrastructural remediation in relationship to the extractive industries.
Bhaskar Sarkar is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Sanata Barbara. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has coedited the collections Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), and The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). He has also coedited two journal special issues: Postcolonial Studies (2005), on “The Subaltern and the Popular”; and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (2012), on “Indian Documentary Studies.” At present, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture. He has also begun work on a monograph about piratical practices in the Global South, and a second monograph on queer underground club cultures in millennial Los Angeles.
The Nation-Form as Media Object
I would like to propose that the nation-form itself can be understood as a media object. Concomitantly, the national is essentially a framework of mediation, a framework that secures a territory, organizes its population, and manages its natural resources.
This is not a matter of inverting Benedict Anderson's famous insight in Imagined Communities, that the novel and the newspaper, print capitalism's unique media objects with mass circulation, helped consolidate an incipient sense of nation-ness. Rather, I begin from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which in upholding peace as a key condition for fruitful trade and commerce, and insisting on burying political differences, placed economic interests before political ones for the first time in European history. The so-called post-Westphalian system of nation-states emerges from such a logic of economic necessity; put differently, the economic logic becomes central to the organization of modern polity. I take the inauguration of the nation-form to be an act of mediation that becomes necessary under capitalist modernity. This particular type of mediation has to do with the organization of the world's population into distinctive political communities, each with its exclusive pool of natural resources and labor, and its own system of governance.
Whereas Anderson's point was about media objects bolstering the sense of belonging to (an imagined) political community, my point is that the establishment of the national community has to do with mediating--demarcating, taking charge of, and managing--resources for that community. This is why the nation-form itself should be regarded as a media object. National mediation proceeds across multiple sectors, along many vectors. To elucidate my point in terms of the formal properties of national mediation, or the formal processes that materialize the nation-form and the formal aspects which define it, I will focus on the vector of planning in postcolonial India.
Marc Steinberg is Professor of Cinema and director of The Platform Lab at Concordia University, Montreal. His research focuses on the impacts of digital platforms on media industries and everyday life. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) among other books. He has recently co-edited In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Institute of Network Cultures, 2024) and is currently writing The Convenience Story, a book about the Japanese convenience store and the platformization of convenience.
SoftBank Mediation Theory
This paper takes up the massive telecommunications firm, tech company, and transnational investment fund SoftBank to think the various kinds of media and mediations we find. A “technology bank” and platform operator across regions, SoftBank mediates everything from US-Japan-China geopolitics, to Asian regional payment apps from Alipay (China) to Paytm (India) to PayPay (Japan). Against suggestions that tech megacorps are merely rentierist (extracting rents without adding value), this research considers the multiple forms of mediation the company effectuates. What would we gain, I ask, from developing media theory from out of SoftBank’s many mediations?