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Bibliography: "Anime's media mix: franchising toys and characters in Japan" (2012) by Marc Steinberg


Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime's media mix: franchising toys and characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

In this book, Steinberg introduces Anime’s Media Mix which proposes to analyze the interaction of media forms and consuming subjects by situating the emergence of the anime system in the context of media transformations (the systematization of the media mix); cultural shifts (rise of post-Fordism and its consumer culture); and the continuous serial consumption of transmedia worlds that develops out of these. It offers a different point view of transmedia movement as it presents the longer history of the media mix and suggests that it cannot be thought of apart from the media phenomenon that garnered Japan fame and acclaim in recent decades: through anime. Specifically, three concepts explored in this book will provide significant foundations for discussion within my research: (1) Character merchandising, to which Steinberg defines within the anime framework as the dissemination of the character image into the lives of Japanese children, and eventually, citizens of all ages; (2) Media ecology, to which Steinberg borrows from the works of Matthew Fuller and Félix Guattari that signals the necessity of treating media in the plural, and acknowledges the dynamic interplay of media and things, which are changing and interdependent, and interact much like an ecosystem; and (3) Media environment, which refers to the media ecology as a system of media and its lived experience by human subjects with regard to the influence of life under late capitalism, thus making it increasingly inseparable from all aspects of contemporary life.

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