The Aesthetics of Convenience: From Retail to Platforms | Marc Steinberg

The Aesthetics of Convenience: From Retail to Platforms

Platforms and convenience stores alike ply the user with the promise of convenience. As early Japanese store advocates in Japan of the 1970s remarked, though, convenience doesn’t just exist out there in the world – it must be produced. In this sense, the history of convenience stores in Japan could be told through moments in the production of the “close and convenient,” to borrow the motto of 7-Eleven Japan. Likewise for digital platforms which are genealogically tied to the retail format, insofar as early smartphone creators thought of their project as creating a convenience store on your phone. Drawing from research done for my Convenience Story book, this talk examines the production of convenience focusing especially on the aesthetic dimensions of Japanese convenience stores. What does convenience look like, and feel like, in store form? It uses this analysis of the aesthetics of the Japanese convenience store as a way of addressing methodological questions about how we can critically grapple with the promise of convenience in everything from retail to platforms to GenAI that beset us, daily. Like convenience itself, the critique of convenience shouldn’t just exist out there in the word – it must be produced, and reinvented.

Marc Steinberg is Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs The Platform Lab. He is the author of the award-winning Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and is co-editor of In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Institute of Network Cultures, 2024). He has authored articles on everything from Toyotism as a precursor to platforms, to convenience stores, to platform capitalism and super apps in Asia. He is currently completing a book on the global Japanese convenience store, titled The Convenience Story.
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Contact: [email protected]
Image credit: Yoh-Plus

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