Japan has fewest digital friends
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11501625
This article from the BBC is an interesting follow-up to last week’s cultural discussions with regards to nations and their digital interactions with the world. In class we considered what effect a country’s blogs and other new mediums of digital communication can have economically, politically and socially on their nation and the world. Statistics about these new forms of communication can also be interpreted to share another dimension of cultural interaction. It is interesting to consider how a country’s on-line behavior can be symbolic of the country’s daily societal interactions. For example, in Japan, most users have few Facebook friends compared with other countries. In the article, Matthew Froggatt suggests that Japan could be "a culture that embraces fewer but closer friendships." What other societal interactions are demonstrated through digital communication statistics?
The article is based on a study by Discover Digital Life. Discover Digital Life claims to have performed, “The largest and most comprehensive study of the global digital consumer - ever.” This may be a useful link for anyone interested in writing their final paper about digital media usage.
http://discoverdigitallife.com
I know it is a little silly to comment on your own post, but I wanted to comment on the difficulty of extracting useable data from a study such as the one listed above. It may be very complex to accurately represent a nation using data to interpret cultural values and societal interactions. The example in the article is that, Matthew Froggatt suggests that Japan could be "a culture that embraces fewer but closer friendships.” This assumption is based on how many Facebook friends most users have in Japan. This assumption fails to consider that perhaps many people in Japan don’t use Facebook or there may be another similar program that is used as the major social media source in Japan.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of something little that came up when I was in Japan. Going around on Facebook was a vote about whether or not the "Like" buttons should be changed to Japanese. There is a definitely language barrier between Japanese and English and some of my Japanese friends were having a bit of trouble navigating the site in English, while Western pals were having trouble reading/responding in japanese text sometimes. So, maybe Facebook is just not viewed as that accessible. Or, other social media platforms that are more mobile-phone friendly may be dominant there.
ReplyDeleteThat being said do think there is something to the fact that Japan is very collectivist. My students did not want to be competitive and so the inherently competitive "who has the most friends", "mememe this is what I am doing NOW!", "i have this opinion and I am going to download badges/apps/etc. about it" nature of Facebook may be a bit of a cultural turn-off.