Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

The concept of anonymous originate in 90s. Japan was relatively late embracing IT. ISDN was just about to be introduced and the whole internet was largely of underground phenomenon especially in early 90s. Many information/data posted in internet involved hacking, warez, copyrighted material, pornography including child pornography, snuff, drugs, bombs, etc as well as no-hold-barred discussion which was also common sight in USENET in English Due to lax data protection law as well as the fact that most community generated site were owned by an individual, people were still reluctant to even create avatar account. More importantly, many of these site start as a secret retreat from the owner's real life, where s/he can be away from his job, his social standing, obligation, etc. Consequently, the owner of site often remained anonymous but with a designated nickname such as Kanrinin-san (Mr/Mrs Admin). Consequently, forum which requires registration never really took off in Japan. Later, these anonymous message board including USENET, which preceded it, came to be know collectively as "Nanashi Warudo" (The World of Anonymous, Nanashi=NoName=Anonymous), which in turn was mock of "Ayashii Warudo" "The World of Suspicious/Dubious". The armature anonymous message board had number limitation, most notably the limitation of server capacity. Due to higher cost of bandwidth in 90s, dominant form of community site was text based and did not allow transfer of image. Secondly, only form fund to run the site was from the owner's day job and meagre earning from (often pornographic) banner ad. Moreover, free and open nature of anonymous nature of the posting made any community message board prone to sudden increase in traffic which result in frequent shut down of any popular message board. Moreover, the simple queing of thread in the board made it difficult to find a target thread among the crowd of thread in the board. These restriction limited the appeal of the message board to te

This difference in causal lineage between civic activity and other social activity seems critical to me, though Putnam seems to forget it when he summarizes his causal analysis a chapter later. There he bundles civic engagement together with sociability, and concludes that half of the decline in "social capital" is due to generational turnover, another quarter of it is due to television, and the remainder is the consequence of time pressures and money pressures and suburbanization.