"What Happened to the Media Mix? Or, On the Rise of 'Contents' in Japan" – Marc Steinberg, Concordia University, Montreal

“Over the last decade we have witnessed the rise of the term ‘contents’ (kontentsu) and its most frequent iteration, ‘contents business’, in Japanese news media, governmental white papers, business manuals, and books on the entertainment industry. Sometimes referring to simply to digital information, sometimes to the works of anime, manga, and film, the precise meaning of the term remains ambiguous. Nonetheless, the term has become key to the current state of media convergence in Japan. This talk offers a preliminary approach to the question,’What is contents?’ by sketching the media historical background against which the term emerges, and offering one way of grasping its elusive meaning via a detour into the Japanese advertising world of the 1980s.”