Néojaponisme » Blog Archive » The Fear… of the Internet - 0 views
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• A lack of user generated media — YouTube clips, in particular — featuring Japanese faces and real names. Many performers, despite virtuoso-level skills, wear masks or otherwise obscure faces in their video content. • The predominance of anonymous sites like 2ch as the main corridors of internet culture. • Blog writers, who have not established fame through other media, almost never reveal real names, even when the information and service provided is of professional quality and not explicitly personal. (More on this here.)
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rachelng on 11 Jun 09almost completely opposite to the Facebook/ MySpace/ Twitter culture?
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• Leading management company Johnny’s Jimusho does not allow the use of its talents’ faces on websites to promote their own projects. When images are used, the company fuzzes or otherwise distorts the pictures. (More here.)
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Whilst the rest of the world sees the internet as a golden marketing opportunity for their stars, Johnny's Jimusho (which holds a monopoly over Japan's boyband market) is famous for refusing to let their talents' images be used on the internet. Even if say one of their stars were appearing in a TV drama, the official website of that drama can't use his image for promotion. Instead, they can only stick a distorted, fuzzy pic. The reason is because the company sells official shop photos of their talents and they're deathly afraid that fangirls would get their own pics from the internet and print them out themselves. It's... an interesting marketing strategy, to put it mildly.
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I can already hear the growing protests to this line of thought, however: stop trying to fit Japan into the American model of internet development.
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I agree, but I also feel that this article seems to be in danger of treating the Japanese internet-using population as one big homogenous group, which is one massive assumption.
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Fear #3 — being lynched by an anonymous mob — also seems to be totally legitimate, in that the internet in Japan so far has been almost exclusively about anonymous mobs making trouble for individuals and industry. This writer has found himself on a 2ch page called “Suspicious Foreigners” (someone wrote about my picture, “He looks like an Arab.”) 2ch has shattered many lives, and seeing that the 2ch mobs basically operate without any sort of constraint or liability, most people are smart not to throw their real names or faces out for bait. The Japanese net is basically a den for the “tyranny of the majority” — and the best part is the “majority” could literally be ten pathetic human beings in soiled sweatsuits operating out of some net café in Miyagi-ken and we would have no idea.
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Interesting. Whilst Western media critics seem to focus a lot on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which are almost all about using real names and posting up real photos, the biggest internet phenomenon in Japan is 2ch, a huge forum populated by swarms and swarms of anonymous posters.
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A fully-realized internet will be critical for Japan achieving some of its own stated goals: prolonged economic growth, greater democracy, more transparency, greater geographic dispersion of economic activity, and equal access to knowledge.
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satisfying conclusion? how can such an internet culture be achieved? is the Western internet model necessarily better than others? does a 'fully-realized internet' necessarily lead to positive social change?
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Mainstream media hates the web simply they can’t find the way to make money out of it,but know it is eating up their pie in the market and there are no business models they can follow.
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I actually really like this point and wished it was developed a bit more. The debate becomes: who really holds the power and the sway over interent trends? Anonymous, individual users, or big-name corporates?
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I think I’ve gotten to a point where my online “fake identity” has gotten more meaningful than my real name. It’s no longer anonymity. In that sense, it could be meaningless to convince famous Bloggers to reveal themselves. Hell, the distinction of real and fake identity has always been superficial anyways.
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This is probably scarily true. Important issues here, from media studies, sociological, psychological points of view....
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an interesting read about Japanese attitudes towards the internet, which, according to the writer, are very different from the Western tendencies to share and publicise everything about yourself.
