Today, communication could take many forms regardless of time and space. Wide range: from analog methods such as letter and phone to digital methods such as email, facebook and twitter. Popularization of the Internet was truly revolutionary and had a wide impact on us and now it has likely changed our value. I'd like to put this into perspective, a world wide view, and put a pin on Japan, try to recognize the reason Japanese people have got to the place where it is.
The following part is how I live in daily life today, as an example of how much different it has become than before.
In the morning, as soon as I wake up, I post something like "good morning" on twitter then somebody would reply to me "morning. have a nice day" then I get motivated a little bit. When I get to some place outside, I check in on foursquare, somebody would give a comment or advice on it even though we are not that close. After coming back to home, I come down with a facebook disease. Upload photos of the day, some comments would fall down on pictures afterwards. Most of these activities could be seen publicly.
What is the point of doing these deeds?
I think, and as probably most people would likely to think, it's all about connection between you and your friends for assuring that you are not isolated from the society. This is probably a basic theory that people believe in on social networking service(SNS).
In Japan, where pre-established harmony is regarded as the most important component of society, people are, in the first place, supposed to have a sensitive perception on a society. Like how they should act to fit in to a community. They were closely formed in a tight network which originates from agricultural customs in the past. Judging from this fact, Japanese people should be able to live without SNS because they are born to live inherently close together to begin with. But they did not.
Seemingly, mixi (the largest SNS in Japan) has the key to understand how Japanese people reached this place. What mixi has done is to foster this type of society even further, not to help extent their realms of friendship but to dig deeper within it. It is not too much to say that mixi's propose was to let their members produce many closed groups. You can intuitively feel that this website is meant to be working something exclusive as it doesn't have tagging feature or anything that bothers one's closed living, compared to other SNSs. mixi regime has been predominant for a long time, not to mention 2ch's culture and attitudes were entirely blocked out by the mixi users.... well, nominally.
(Although mixi is still the most popular SNS in Japan, nobody could deny that it is slowly dying. Services that mixi has been launching lately have been just a copy of facebook features or that of twitter. A problem of lack of originality is emerged apparently.)
While mixi is still prevailing through Japan, people are meeting a new SNS like Twitter. And it has become very popular even TV programs sometimes give you a hash tag to talk about it. To be honest, it was shocking to me that Japanese people smoothly accepted the concept of twitter because I assumed that they wouldn't. Twitter's concept is, as you may know, to tweet inconsequential information within 140 characters. To my understanding, this contradicts the nature of Japanese people, because Japanese people tend to write more than the rest of the people in the world, as in fact the most written language in the whole blog of the Internet is Japanese at least as of 2006. (http://www.soumu.go.jp/iicp/chousakenkyu/data/research/survey/telecom/2008/2008-1-02-2.pdf)
And on top of that, twitter is providing relatively an open platform that is usually exposed to the whole Internet users out there, which is something that Japanese people deemed as dangerous before. But, twitter came into style. And here I am tweeting about my stuff everyday.
There are any number of reasons to explain the popularity of twitter.
One of them is, a system of micro blogging itself.
It is said that Japanese people are good at making things small and tiny. Japanese gardens are good examples, as it is a place where everything is possibly composed beautifully within a small property. Also, Haiku should be taken into consideration that is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterized by three qualities. People have puzzled over and over to make sentences better within only 15 characters. Many have experience of struggling with compressing something into a dense thing without any loss of its meaning. Twitter's limitation, up to 140 characters, may make them deliberate about their tweet before posting just like they do in Haiku activity.
Second reason is tweet. It is relatively as same function as uttering in real world, which is not as powerful as an public opinion expressed at other places. People inherently have something to persist but the oppression of society makes them hold back their feelings and opinions. Tweets are considered as "inconsequential information", it does allow you to raise any kind of topic you subconsciously want to bring up with. Tons of tweets might be an representative phenomenon of bouncing back in Japanese society.
I here see a latent phase of transition of Japanese society where they subconsciously wish to change to a society that is widely open to anyone from a closed community. Maybe a paradigm shift.
Posted at WIRED CAFE in Osaka Sta.
The following part is how I live in daily life today, as an example of how much different it has become than before.
In the morning, as soon as I wake up, I post something like "good morning" on twitter then somebody would reply to me "morning. have a nice day" then I get motivated a little bit. When I get to some place outside, I check in on foursquare, somebody would give a comment or advice on it even though we are not that close. After coming back to home, I come down with a facebook disease. Upload photos of the day, some comments would fall down on pictures afterwards. Most of these activities could be seen publicly.
What is the point of doing these deeds?
I think, and as probably most people would likely to think, it's all about connection between you and your friends for assuring that you are not isolated from the society. This is probably a basic theory that people believe in on social networking service(SNS).
In Japan, where pre-established harmony is regarded as the most important component of society, people are, in the first place, supposed to have a sensitive perception on a society. Like how they should act to fit in to a community. They were closely formed in a tight network which originates from agricultural customs in the past. Judging from this fact, Japanese people should be able to live without SNS because they are born to live inherently close together to begin with. But they did not.
Seemingly, mixi (the largest SNS in Japan) has the key to understand how Japanese people reached this place. What mixi has done is to foster this type of society even further, not to help extent their realms of friendship but to dig deeper within it. It is not too much to say that mixi's propose was to let their members produce many closed groups. You can intuitively feel that this website is meant to be working something exclusive as it doesn't have tagging feature or anything that bothers one's closed living, compared to other SNSs. mixi regime has been predominant for a long time, not to mention 2ch's culture and attitudes were entirely blocked out by the mixi users.... well, nominally.
(Although mixi is still the most popular SNS in Japan, nobody could deny that it is slowly dying. Services that mixi has been launching lately have been just a copy of facebook features or that of twitter. A problem of lack of originality is emerged apparently.)
While mixi is still prevailing through Japan, people are meeting a new SNS like Twitter. And it has become very popular even TV programs sometimes give you a hash tag to talk about it. To be honest, it was shocking to me that Japanese people smoothly accepted the concept of twitter because I assumed that they wouldn't. Twitter's concept is, as you may know, to tweet inconsequential information within 140 characters. To my understanding, this contradicts the nature of Japanese people, because Japanese people tend to write more than the rest of the people in the world, as in fact the most written language in the whole blog of the Internet is Japanese at least as of 2006. (http://www.soumu.go.jp/iicp/chousakenkyu/data/research/survey/telecom/2008/2008-1-02-2.pdf)
And on top of that, twitter is providing relatively an open platform that is usually exposed to the whole Internet users out there, which is something that Japanese people deemed as dangerous before. But, twitter came into style. And here I am tweeting about my stuff everyday.
There are any number of reasons to explain the popularity of twitter.
One of them is, a system of micro blogging itself.
It is said that Japanese people are good at making things small and tiny. Japanese gardens are good examples, as it is a place where everything is possibly composed beautifully within a small property. Also, Haiku should be taken into consideration that is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterized by three qualities. People have puzzled over and over to make sentences better within only 15 characters. Many have experience of struggling with compressing something into a dense thing without any loss of its meaning. Twitter's limitation, up to 140 characters, may make them deliberate about their tweet before posting just like they do in Haiku activity.
Second reason is tweet. It is relatively as same function as uttering in real world, which is not as powerful as an public opinion expressed at other places. People inherently have something to persist but the oppression of society makes them hold back their feelings and opinions. Tweets are considered as "inconsequential information", it does allow you to raise any kind of topic you subconsciously want to bring up with. Tons of tweets might be an representative phenomenon of bouncing back in Japanese society.
I here see a latent phase of transition of Japanese society where they subconsciously wish to change to a society that is widely open to anyone from a closed community. Maybe a paradigm shift.
Posted at WIRED CAFE in Osaka Sta.
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