Suchergebnisse

This essay explores the genealogical overlap between the wall and the screen by tracing the material and discursive formation of China's Great Firewall, a geoblocking system for network censorship, to the cultural history of ping (screen).The censoring effect of the Great Firewall is described in Chinese as pingbi, with the word ping referring to an architectural object that is simultaneously a system of visual display and a device of spatial management. Examining the structure and operation of ping in Chinese history, the essay argues that ping is a combinational media system of the wall-screen, a noninformation surface that displays itself to enable spatial enclosure. As a self-displaying system, the positioning of ping not only signifies sociopolitical demarcation but is also bound up with the spectacular display and performance of the imperial sovereign. This meaning of ping as wall-screen has shaped the construction of the Great Firewall as a technological and political project, shifting its conceptual framework from security to sovereignty.

Abstract
This essay interrogates the transmedial, transnational expansion of platforms by analyzing the mediation functions and affective experiences of a discursive interface, danmaku. It is a unique interface design originally featured by the Japanese video-sharing platform Niconico to render user comments flying over videos on screen. The danmaku interface has been widely adopted in China by video-streaming websites, social media, and theatrical film exhibitions. Examining the fundamental incoherence that is structured by the interface – the incoherence between content and platform, between the temporal experiences of pseudo-live-ness and spectral past – the paper underlines the notion of 'contact' as the central logic of platforms and argues that danmaku functions as a volatile contact zone among conflicting modes, logics, and structures of digital media. Such contested contacts generate affective intensity of media regionalism, in which the transmedial/transnational processes managed by platforms in material/textual traffic are mapped by the flow of affect on the interface.

Abstract
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.