Youth, social media and connectivity in Japan

Abstract

Children and young people these days are born and grow up in an incredibly rich global media environment. They engage with multiple media such as mobile phones, the internet, digital television and game consoles in their everyday lives. They have constant complex online and offline interactions with others via social media. In Japan, for example, since 1999, people have been buying mobile phones with the i-mode service through which they can access the internet. Over the past ten years, young people have been able to watch television and video, listen to music, play games, take photographs and access the internet entirely via their mobile phones. To describe people in their late 20s who have grown up adept at manipulating their mobile phones (even without looking at them), the Japanese term oyayubibunka (literally, thumb culture) is often used. As they tend to communicate with each other in writing rather than speech, the mobile phone is called kei-tai (portable device) rather than ‘phone’. As well as texting and emails, they also access information, images, and culture nationally and transnationally via social media, using both Japanese sites such as Mixi and Line¹ and American sites such as Facebook and Twitter.