2026 Tom O'Regan Public Lecture - Professor Marc Steinberg

The Aesthetics of Convenience: From Retail to Platforms

All are welcome to attend our free event.

About the lecture

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 it as a convenience store on your phone. Drawing from research done for Professor Steinberg's book, The Convenience Story, this talk examines the production of convenience focusing especially on the aesthetic dimensions of Japanese convenience stores. 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.

About our speaker

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.

Event details

Date: Thursday 28 May 2026
Time: 5:15pm for 5:30–6:30pm, followed by light refreshments (6:30pm - 7:15pm)
Location: Room 275, Level 2, Global Change Institute (Building 20), UQ St Lucia (and the GCI Atrium for light refreshments)

Enquiries: engagement@hass.uq.edu.au

This lecture hosted by UQ's School of Communication and Arts is supported by the Tom O'Regan Visiting Fellowship and The Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies.

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