Abstract
This project explores how lower class individuals living in a small rural Japanese community employ digital media in their daily lives and how this use of technology shapes their sense of self. Drawing from ethnographic research, it considers the locally specific ways in which individuals have embraced digital technology and how the technology’s “imagined affordances” intersect with their cultural, regional, and class identities, both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. It argues that despite community members’ active use of digital technology, numerous barriers (both imagined and actual) continue to limit their ability to fully engage in digital culture and discusses how these barriers lead to a sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection from both urban contexts and an imagined global community. It concludes that more carefully situated local accounts of digital praxis are a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world.
Keywords
Introduction
Scholars speak of digital technologies’ unprecedented ability to connect individuals across time and space as a set of affordances. In media studies, this concept has come to refer to the relationship between the materiality of technology—what it allows people to do (e.g. upload a video)—and the lived experience of those who use it (e.g. the sense of connection emerging from a friend “liking” the video). How people use technology, however, is necessarily embedded in broader sociocultural processes and shaped by individuals’ expectations, perceptions, and experiences as “people bring their linguistic and cultural capital, their investments, their identities and their aspirations” to the digital world (Prinsloo and Rowsell, 2012: 273).
Thus, in order to fully understand digital communication, scholars must engage with the ways in which individuals develop their own “vernacular affordances” (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym, 2015: 2) in their use of technology in a variety of different social contexts. Research on the situated negotiation of digital media has, however, most frequently dealt with Anglo-American and European environments, and has tended to view “new media hardware and software as inherently or predictably resourceful [. . .] regardless of how and where people are situated” (Prinsloo and Rowsell, 2012: 271). It has further historically skewed toward urban middle-class (and, often, younger) communities (Zuckerman, 2015). This latter tendency has been particularly true in the case of Japan, often associated with its large metropolises and a relative lack of class consciousness (Toshiki, 2001).
Keeping these limitations in mind, this project explores how lower class individuals living in a rural Japanese community employ digital media in their everyday lives, and how this use of digital technology shapes their sense of self. Heeding scholars’ call for more carefully situated ethnographically inflected examinations of the intersection of technology, culture, and social organization that approach “technologies not simply as tools that neutrally work to accomplish particular tasks, but rather as intertwined with social processes” (Srinivasan, 2017: 23), it considers how the multiple locally specific “vernacular” (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym, 2015) and “imagined” affordances (Nagy and Neff, 2015) developed by members of the community intersect with their cultural, regional, generational, and class identities both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. In doing so, its aim is to diversify our angle of analysis, and “thicken”—in the Geertzian (1973) sense of the term—our scholarly descriptions of individuals’ relationship to technology in an increasingly interconnected global era.
Whose global village? Affordances and imagination
The rise of digital technologies and their potential to connect individuals across time and space in an increasingly networked society (Castells, 2004) has generated much academic discussion—a complete analysis of which is beyond the scope of this essay. In a nutshell, as Zuckerman (2015) puts it, “the sheer amount written about [the Internet] in the past decade guaranteed that the network would be placed at the center of visions for a world made better through connection” (p. 29). Indeed, debates about the ability of digital technologies to bring cultures closer together—and, less frequently, about who is excluded from this process—have come to shape broader considerations of the imagined dimensions of contemporary globalization characterized by an increased awareness of global interconnectedness (Appadurai, 2013). As visionary imaginings of a future digital social order emerged (e.g. Jenkins et al., 2013; Negroponte, 1995; Rheingold, 2012; Shirky, 2010), scholars came to realize the need for more nuanced understandings of technologies’ multifaceted global sociocultural impact. As Zuckerman (2015) continues, The belief that connecting people through the Internet leads inexorably to global understanding and world peace is one not worth defending. Believing that technologies influence whom and what we know and care about is a more complicated idea, and one worth our close consideration. (p. 30)
In other words, as Srinivasan (2017) concludes, “the main question needs to be rewritten” (p. 25).
The concept of affordances, as it has developed in the humanities and social sciences, provides a powerful theoretical tool for rewriting, and complicating, the questions we pose about the sociocultural dimensions of digital technologies. Recognizing the need to balance the social and material aspects of technological use, scholars have expanded on Gibson’s (1966, 1979) original definitions of affordances to develop “a relational approach to understanding how people interact with technology” (Evans et al., 2017: 35; Leonardi, 2013). At its best, theorizing through affordances allow us to “account for the ways that technological artifacts or platforms privilege, open up, or constrain particular actions and social practices” (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym, 2015: 2) while keeping in mind human agency. It helps us come to terms with the fact that “[d]esigns and environments like media representations do not tell us what to think or do, but they do shape what we think with” (Shaw, 2017: 596).
Nagy and Neff’s (2015) concept of “imagined affordance” adds an additional layer of complexity to our understanding of how “the meanings of technology are negotiated and renegotiated by users through perception, mediation, and materiality” (p. 7). Noting that “[i]magination connotes perception, not just rationality,” Nagy and Neff (2015) contrast imagined affordance with the “more rigid and fixed notion of affordance that communication scholars have struggled with,” to define it as “emerging between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (p. 5). Importantly, in addition to “the expectations and beliefs of users, whether or not they are ‘true’ or ‘right’” (Nagy and Neff, 2015: 4) imagined affordances incorporate the “emotional, affective, and ‘non-rational’ elements of the relationship between users and technologies” (Nagy and Neff, 2015: 6). In other words, the concept presses us to “push back on the assumption that affordances are rational and immutable while demonstrating that at their core they are about interpretation” (Shaw, 2017: 596).
Incorporating imagination into analyses of digital media use also usefully connects affordances to broader discussions of the work of the imagination in shaping the production of locality under conditions of globalization. Almost 25 years ago, Appadurai (1996) called for a “new alertness to the fact that ordinary lives today are more often powered not by the givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media [either directly or indirectly] suggest are available” (p. 55). A complete analysis of the much-discussed relationship between the imagination, media technology, and concrete life-worlds is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that the imagination has emerged as a “vital resource in all social processes and projects” (Appadurai, 2013: 287) in our globally digitally connected era (Darling-Wolf, 2015). On the other hand, as the concept of (imagined) affordances emerged as a useful tool to explore “how people use technology to come together [or become even more distanced from each other]” (Nikunen, 2018; Tiidenberg and Siibak, 2018: 4) in the form of partly imagined “networked publics” (Baym, 2010; boyd, 2011: 39; Ostertag and Ortiz, 2017), the need to relate global digital connections to local concrete life-worlds became evident. As Papacharissi (2015) notes, “The role of sociocultural context in shaping the outcome of digitally enabled expression and connection cannot be emphasized enough” (p. 122).
As noted, however, research on individuals’ negotiation of digital media—and the “imagined affordances” they produce—has tended to focus on Anglo-American and/or middle-class contexts, prompting scholars to call for more carefully situated, contextualized, and ethnographically inflected analyses across socioculturally divergent settings. Proposing that we adopt a “sense-making approach to affordance” McVeigh-Schultz and Baym (2015: 2) offer the concept of “vernacular affordance” as a means to “begin unpacking the multiple and intersecting ways [individuals] make sense of the relationship between the material objects they use and the practices they use them for” (p. 11). A number of scholars have heeded this call for “vernacular accounts of the relationship between practices and technologies” (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym, 2015: 2), illustrating how localized analyses of digital praxis allow us to “see tensions, power imbalances and, at the same time, idiosyncratic use and understanding of the digital” (Prinsloo and Rowsell, 2012: 274). Pearce and Vitak’s (2016) work on the affordances of social media in Azerbaijan, for instance, highlights the extent to which sociocultural factors “influence the cost-benefit analyses individuals engage in” (p. 2608) when using digital technology (see also Auld et al., 2012; Bessant and Watts, 2017; Collins and Wellman, 2010; Gyabak and Godina, 2011; Srinivasan, 2017). As Shaw (2017) reminds us, “Technology too exists within, not outside of culture and hegemonic power structures” (p. 595).
Methodology
It is partly in response to the need for more studies of digital communication “on the global or social periphery” (Prinsloo and Rowsell, 2012: 272) that I turned to the use of digital media in the small Japanese community where I have been conducting research for some 20 years. As citizens of one of the most economically powerful nations on the planet, members of the community certainly cannot qualify as hailing from the global south. However, Japan’s uneasy status as a non-Western technological leader combined with the community’s position at the country’s social periphery due to its working-class, rural nature and relative geographic isolation make it an interesting terrain on which to explore individuals’ negotiation of digital technologies in ways that complicate the usual, and often problematically dichotomized, labels of Western/urban/middle-class versus non-Western/rural/poor.
Furthermore, I had identified a relatively recent shift in members of the community’s engagement with digital technologies. For many years, digital and social media had simply not been a part of our frequent conversations about media use in my regular visits. Mobile digital media, had, of course, long been widely available and I had witnessed people transition from the early keitai (mid-1990s) to flip camera phones (early 2000s), to the current sumaho—the Japanese shortcut for “smartphone.” However, if frequently used, these devices did not generate much discussion and few individuals seemed to actively engage with social media platforms. 1 It was not until a visit in the summer of 2016 that I started to notice that terms like insuta (short for Instagram) or Yafoo more frequently permeated the community’s vernacular, and that information about its most significant social events could now be found on Facebook or YouTube.
I returned to the community in the summer of 2018 to investigate this shift, broadly focusing on the following research questions:
How does digital media enter into the daily lives of members of the community?
What “vernacular” and “imagined” affordances do individuals develop through their digital media use?
How does digital media use intersect with different identity factors, particularly age and geography in the context of this community?
How does individuals’ use of digital media shape their sense of self in relationship to local, national, and global contexts?
How does individuals’ imagination of other, differently located, users shape their own relationship to technology?
For the purpose of this study, “digital media” was defined as media requiring the use of computer, tablet, or smartphone technology. “Social media” was defined as websites and applications allowing users to create and share content and to participate in social networking. Following McVeigh-Schultz and Baym (2015), the term “vernacular” is used here to encompass all of the “sense-making” dimensions of individuals’ specific relationship to technology including, but not limited to, their “local,” “everyday,” and “rural” experiences. Finally, it is worth noting that while “imagined affordances” may be theorized “as webs of relations among user perception, attitudes, and expectations; the materiality of artifacts; and the intentions of makers and designers” (Davis and Chouinard, 2016: 242), this study’s focus on users means that it cannot address the latter part of this definition. Its goal is, instead, to further tease out the social dimensions (Schmidt, 2007) of affordances situated at the “intersection of history, biography, and culture” (Davis and Chouinard, 2016: 246).
In order to do so, I conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with a total of 51 individuals in the community using a protocol approved by my institution’s Institutional Review Board. Twelve of these interviews were conducted in groups of two to six participants and seven were one-on-one. The mix of one-on-one and group interviews organically emerged as I gave informants a chance to decide what was most comfortable to them. While the group interviews took on some of the dimensions of focus groups, they differed in that participants knew each other and were not individually recruited. Examples of such interviews include conversations with married couples or members of the same family (e.g. mother-in-law with daughter-in-law) and groups of friends coming together for various activities (e.g. members of an art or qigong class). All interviews were conducted face-to-face in Japanese 2 and lasted on average approximately an hour. No significant differences in responses emerged between one-on-one and group interviews—everyone seemed to equally enjoy chatting about their digital media use (or lack thereof). Participants were recruited through my contacts in the community and a snowball sampling method. The gender (identified as either male or female because all informants 3 identified as cis-gendered) and age breakdown of participants can be found in Table 1. While the same questions were asked in each interview, their semi-structured nature allowed for flexibility to engage in topics that arose in the interviewing process in a conversational style (Brennen, 2017 [2012]). In addition, I conducted extensive participant observation in three different households and with household members’ friends and relatives in a variety of contexts (e.g. social activities, educational settings, hobbies, and related activities), leading to numerous additional informal conversations. All names appearing in the following sections of this essay are pseudonyms. Age is either identified precisely (e.g. 22-year-old man) or as a decade (e.g. woman in her 60s) depending on individuals’ level of comfort in sharing this information. Located on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, and about an hour away from the island’s largest city of half a million, the community is aging due to youth exodus to urban centers. While certainly not poor by global standards, members of the community tend to be relatively lower class—rice farmers, small shop keepers, lower level white-collar workers—than the average Japanese population.
Gender and age breakdown of participants.
Borrowing from media scholar Phil Agre (2000), Srinivasan (2017) advocates for a “deep diversity,” where “knowledge is treated as a process rather than a commodity” (p. 9). Deep diversity, Srinivasan (2017: 9) notes, can embrace the diversity and complexity of peoples, environments, and cultures where [digital] tools have already migrated, considering for example the realities of rural people with mobile phones from a more immersive perspective. In so doing, we can think past simplistic and incomplete notions such as having “access” or being “connected,” and consider how these tools may be shaped in the context of everyday life across the world.
The following analysis is offered as a contribution to this broad project. As such, its aim is to tease out the relationship between a specific sociocultural environment and technological use. Rather than seeking to make statements about easily essentialized “unique” features of Japanese culture and/or rural social organization, this account of a community’s relationship to technology strives to understand how individuals negotiate the particular set of circumstances arising from their “local” positioning. By focusing on a differently situated “local” community—as noted, analyses of digital media have tended to focus on Western English-speaking urban contexts—it endeavors to add a new layer to the deep diversity Srinivasan describes.
It is important to note, however, that in our contemporary era the “local” never operates in isolation from the “global.” In a “world of disjunctive flows” (Appadurai, 2001: 6), the two are mutually constitutive dimensions of individuals’ experiences that are “continuously [re]negotiated in relationship to each other” (Darling-Wolf, 2015: 142–143). Or, as Abu-Lughod (1991) reminds us, long-term global processes are manifested locally and specifically, produced in the actions of individuals living their particular lives.
“It’s very convenient!” The practical affordances of digital media
A large sign stands outside the exit of the two-track train station, welcoming tourists to the prefecture in both Japanese and English. A QR code appears at its bottom. When I mentioned the code to folks in the small town, few seemed to have ever noticed it. No one had ever followed it—why would they want to go to a website for tourists? All agreed, however, that digital communication is otherwise very useful. They employed mobile devices to perform a wide variety of tasks ranging from booking hotel rooms to processing insurance claims for their pets’ visits to the vet, and to seek all sorts of information. As Saki, a woman in her 30s put it, “I put in the keyword, and I can know everything.” All unanimously agreed that digital media, and particularly the mobile devices most of them used in their daily lives, are very convenient. Indeed, by far the most frequently mentioned affordances of digital media were ones with a more practical dimension—affordances that simply made performing everyday tasks easier.
Much of this use of digital media had a hyperlocal dimension. For example, Haru, a 46-year-old divorced father explained, “On Google maps if you enter a date, you can search for a month and a day and see what kinds of events are happening in [the prefecture] that you can go do with your children on the weekend.” Yumi, a woman in her 60s, noted that she uses her smartphone “to look for good places to eat or check if a place is open.” Shinji, 38 years old, described how he uses his device to “look for information about local events.” Mei, a woman in her 20s, showed me how she reserves the products she wants to rent from Tsutaya, the local media and culture store: “when you want to rent something, you can reserve it online and then you can go pick it up at the store when it’s available.” In other words, much of this engagement with digital media was connected to physical spaces that are part of the social fabric of the community.
Vernacular and imagined dimensions of “getting things done”
In many respects, members of community’s use of digital media could be argued to be similar to that of other individuals across the globe, who have easy access to technology (and the cultural capital to take advantage of it). A number of culturally inflected uses of digital technology did emerge, however, in our conversations. These included the preference for such online shopping sites as Rakuten over Amazon, or the use of the multipurpose communication app LINE. Similar to the Chinese WeChat in its ability to combine video and voice calls with messaging, news, and social media sharing, LINE was used by everyone who had a smartphone for virtually all digital media use—from placing a call, to sharing photos, to making dinner reservations and checking the weather. In other words, “online” and “on LINE” were largely synonymous in the community’s vernacular. 4 As 20-year-old Haruto concluded, “Japanese use LINE, foreign people use snap chat.”
Other culturally inflected affordances included the use of dictionaries to check the proper writing of kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese written language, collectively deemed one of the most useful features of digital technology (but one also seen as a mixed blessing as people “forget how to write”)—“If I don’t know a kanji, or forgot how to write it, I look it up. I do that very often . . .” (Yumi, woman in her 60s); “I can no longer write kanji, all I can do is read it!” (Yukio, 33-year-old man). Translation apps were also frequently mentioned—“The most important part of it for me is that I can put an English word or a Japanese word into the internet and a translation comes out” (Yoko, woman in her 60s). These affordances, of course, are not unique to the community, but, rather, relate to their identities as Japanese and, more generally, as (largely) non-English speakers.
An example of a more “vernacular” affordance developed in individuals’ sharing and viewing of videos of the matsuri, the fall festival that is by far the most important annual event in the life of the community—“I watch videos of the matsuri . . . There are lots of videos of the matsuri on Facebook!” (Kanako, woman in her 50s). While, as Kanako notes, these videos have started to appear on various social media sites, the most common mode of “sharing” them was, interestingly, for people to gather around a smartphone or tablet and watch them together.
It is also worth noting that even the more pragmatic uses of digital technologies held some imagined dimensions for members of the community. For instance, while everyone agreed that digital media make “all sorts of information” available—“I can get all sorts of information on twitter, anything that I need to know” (Saki, woman in her 30s)—all sorts of information about the community itself was not always actually accessible to its members for a number of reasons. For example, digital access to local news was limited. When I asked 59-year-old Izumi who had mentioned that she gets news headlines on her phone whether these include local news, her reaction was, “Local news . . . no we don’t have anything . . . Just the big important news . . . [. . .] Maybe there’s an app but I don’t know” (Izumi, 59-year-old woman). Eito, a man in his 40s, similarly noted, “When there is something local to look up, it may not be on Yahoo.” In addition, as illustrated in Izumi’s comment above, people did not always know how to access this information (“maybe there’s an app”). Finally, the language barrier remained a significant hurdle. A further comment from Saki powerfully illustrates this tension between the imagined affordance of general access to information and the reality of her personal lack of access as a non-English speaker: There are people from all over the world who are sharing information on Twitter. [. . .] If someone creates a hashtag from any place in the world, then everyone can see it. I can’t read English, but if you can read English, you can understand everything that is happening there with just a click.
As 42-year-old Rio concluded, “If you don’t speak English, you’re in trouble,” to which her 33-year-old sister-in-law Hina added, “Yes, in big trouble.”
Shopping for “things you can’t buy around here”
The case of online shopping is particularly illustrative of the complex intersection of actual and imagined affordances and their link to various identity factors. As in other parts of Japan (and the world), online shopping is quite widespread in the community—“I do a lot of online shopping. That’s mostly what I do online” (Yui, 71-year-old female); “I think everybody buys things online” (Aoi, woman in her 60s). In addition to shopping sites like Rakuten or Mercari, repeatedly mentioned in interviews, the community’s two local grocery stores offer online ordering and free delivery. In fact, interviews conducted in people’s homes were frequently interrupted by the arrival of various goods. As Rio explained, “Online shopping really saves you a lot of time. You can buy all sorts of things for everyday life [日常生活] like water or toilet paper or heavy things.”
While members of the community frequently shopped for “things for everyday life,” another commonly mentioned affordance of digital technology was access to “things that you can’t buy around here”: “I like motorcycles, so, for example, if I want to buy a bike, I check the online auctions” (Riku, 42-year-old man); “We buy English books for the children. And do other kinds of online shopping. [. . .] Mostly things that you can’t find around here . . .” (Shinji, 38-year-old man); “[I buy] aromatherapy. [. . .] You can’t buy [aromatherapy oils] around here” (Saki, woman in her 30s); “I buy the kind of meat that I can’t find here. Like duck meat” (Shingo, man in his 60s); “[T]here is no particular shop that sells my favorite dashi [so I buy it online]” (Aoi, woman in her 60s).
While the availability of online shopping indeed expanded the community’s access to all sorts of products, this affordance often took on a more imagined dimension when individuals compared their own situation with that of urban dwellers, whom they imagined as having easy access to “all of these things.” As Saki explained, “In Tokyo they probably have stores that sell these kinds of things, but not around here, so you have to go to Rakuten.” As a result, online shopping was imagined as more useful and widespread in the countryside than it is in the city: “People in the countryside do more online shopping than people in the city. For [people in the city], it’s very easy to go shopping. They can just go out and shop” (Rio, 42-year-old woman); “In urban areas, they have many stores to choose from, they can just go out and buy things, but in the countryside, we don’t have so many shops, so we do online shopping” (Shinji, 38-year-old man). In other words, the affordance of online shopping was not only connected to the fact that the practice gave members of the community access to an array of products previously out of reach due to the community’s relative geographic isolation, but it took on an additional dimension as uniquely useful to them, when intersecting with their imagination of urban folks not needing and/or engaging in the practice.
The affordances of online shopping further intersected with other aspects of individuals’ identities, including age and class. As relatively lower class individuals, they frequently mentioned saving money as an important affordance of the practice: “Compared to in-store shopping, online shopping is much cheaper. If you compare the prices, they are completely different” (Saki); “It’s cheaper than in the shops here. The same model of the same quality is cheaper” (Hisao, man in his 60s). Informants of all ages also actively clipped digital coupons to use at local stores—“If you have the app, you can get coupons that get you discounts in the stores” (Saki); “I use the McDonald app a lot . . . they have coupons” (Riku, 42-year-old man); “You can get points if you have the app from the store and get money back” (Yui, 71-year-old woman). Finally, online shopping was deemed particularly useful for a less mobile older population who may find it difficult to get to the store. As Yuka, a woman in her 60s, explained, “Now I can still go to the store, but when I’m older, like maybe when I’m 75, I think I will only shop online.”
Thus, members of the community developed a number of vernacular affordances in their practical and hyperlocal use of digital technologies that intersected with their identities as rural, relatively lower class (and, for some, older) individuals. Imagined dimensions of digital media’s affordances also started to emerge in our discussions of technology’s ability to make everyday tasks easier. Imagined affordances, however, were even more present in individuals’ reflections on the more social aspects of digital media, a topic to which I now turn.
Imagined (dis)connections: digital media and social organization
Beyond the practical affordances of digital access, members of the community appreciated technology’s ability to create social connections by allowing them to “stay in touch” with loved ones. They enjoyed being able to reach friends and family instantly wherever they might be, and the sharing of videos, photographs, and information generated strongly positive feelings. As Yumi, a grandmother in her 60s, explained, “On LINE, I share with my daughters . . . I receive and send things and we can all see it. [. . .] And here, I talk with my grandson on video talk.” Yuki, also in her 60s, similarly noted, “I can talk to my daughter and see her on the video. And when she went abroad, she sent me beautiful pictures of her trip. I enjoyed those pictures.”
Younger folks whose childhood friends have often moved to larger cities mentioned reconnecting on social media—“my friends who have moved and people who are living far or abroad, I can check on them on Facebook . . . So you no longer lose contact with people who have moved away . . . you can keep in touch . . .” (Mei, woman in her 20s). As 28-year-old Kaori concluded, “I can keep in touch with people with whom I am separated.”
Imagined connections
The sense of connection afforded by the social dimensions of digital media, was not, however, limited to individuals’ physical social network. As informants reported feeling more “plugged into” national and global conversations, they saw themselves as having access to a broader imagined community. They enjoyed the ability to instantly access and discuss information: “[I]n the world, or Japan news, you can see things immediately [. . .] we can get information very quickly” (Shingo, man in his 60s); “On twitter or these kinds of things, every day they post developing news, you can tell what is happening right now” (Saki, woman in her 30s); “Information comes quickly. [. . .] And you can share this information, and you can talk about it, everyone will talk about it. We have more news to discuss” (Miyu, woman in her 60s).
They used digital media to keep up with their favorite celebrities—“People who are famous have LINE accounts so you can get information about them” (Yume, woman in her 20s); “When I looked at Facebook, I happened to find the page of a famous Kabuki actor” (Yukari, woman in her 70s)—and their feelings of connection were sometimes quite far reaching. For instance, Daisuke, a man in his late 70s who used to work in the United States and is an active social media “lurker” noted, “I have communications from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I get information from them, they send some news”. Or, as Saki explained, “I can instantaneously contact anyone in the world.”
It is important to note that this increased access to information and ability to connect to an imagined global community was interpreted as an affordance distinctive of digital media. As 73-year-old Natsuki put it, “we get lots of information from all over the world, information we wouldn’t have had otherwise.” It was also sometimes seen as an equalizer between rural communities and their more privileged urban counterparts. As 38-year-old Shinji explained, Wherever you live or wherever you are . . . As long as you have this [pointing to his smartphone] you can look it up, anywhere you go, you can access the same information [. . .] We can share everything now so people in urban areas and the countryside all have access to the same information.
Or, as Yume, a woman in her 20s, concluded, “So now everyone can get that information more easily and free.”
As noted, however, members of the community’s actual ability to engage with this imagined global community was curbed by a number of practical barriers including language (lack of English skills), education/class—“It’s convenient, but I don’t know how to use Facebook or twitter, so I’m not sure how convenient it is for me” (Koharu, 42-year-old woman)—and age-related discomfort with technology (a point to which I will return shortly). As a result, their use of social media was in fact rather limited. Of the 51 individuals who participated in formal interviews, 24 (about 47%) said they did not use social media at all, 20 (more than 39%) “had the app but never posted,” 3 (almost 6%) said they occasionally posted, 1 (2%) was a more active user as a lurker but “did not post much anymore,” 1 (2%) was an active user who posted and sometimes communicated with people she did not know, and 2 (4%) said they only used Instagram because it was a requirement of their son’s English class. Only two said they ever communicated with people they don’t know online—one of them through online gaming (see Table 2 for additional details on social media use).
Additional details on social media use.
Two informants (a heterosexual couple) indicated that they use Instagram because it is a requirement of their son’s English conversation class but do not use social media otherwise. They are not included in this table.
Thus, while digital media certainly facilitated my informants’ access to people and information on a global scale, their ability to actively contribute to a broader worldwide conversation remained mostly imagined. While the technical ability to contact anyone in the world existed, very few actually acted on it: “I follow [people], but I don’t communicate with them” (Yume, woman in her 20s); “I don’t know how to contact people I don’t know . . . If someone I don’t know contacts me, I don’t answer back” (Hinata, woman in her 30s); “I read, but I don’t ever post” (Rio, 42-year-old woman); “I don’t use any social media. I don’t post on Facebook” (Hina, 33-year-old woman). As 42-year-old Saya concluded, “I just [communicate with] people in the community.”
Imagined disconnections: feeling garake in the digital age
Furthermore, if digital technology generated feelings of connection and access, it also simultaneously fostered a sense of disconnection when intersecting with different aspects of individuals’ identities. Not surprisingly, age significantly affected people’s experience of digital media. Access to mobile media was certainly widespread even among older members of the community, and some approached the technology with a great willingness to learn—as Natsuki put it, “I’m 73 years old and I think that it is important to try new things when you are my age.” Many older folks nevertheless felt left out of the digital revolution. The term garake emerged as a shortcut to discuss this sense of age-related disconnection in our conversations.
An abbreviation of Galapagos keitai, the term was originally coined in the 1990s to describe the Japanese telecommunication industry’s early development in isolation from the rest of the world. Today, it “addresses the peculiar type of mobile media circulated within Japan from the mid-1990s until the rise of smartphones” (Kim, 2017: 312). For my informants, being garake dake (owning only a cellphone that is not a smartphone) broadly signified being left out of much of the affordances of digital communication. As 71-year-old Yui noted, “I have friends who are garake so I need to call them directly if I want to contact them.” The switch from garake to smartphone was a frequent subject of conversation among older members of the community, as in this exchange between Miyu, Sakura, Yaka, Kana, and Yuki, all women in their 60s:
Maybe I’ll change from garake to smartphone soon.
Last year, I changed from garake to smartphone. So now I have a smartphone, but really, it’s full of things that I don’t know so I use it in the same way that I used my garake phone. I also have a PC, but I only use it to watch movies or listen to CDs.
Three years ago, I had a garake phone and a PC, but now I switched to a smartphone. So now I use my smartphone to go online.
Mine isn’t a garake phone, but it’s a really simple smartphone for old people.
I’m garake.
These relatively older women’s comments simultaneously illustrate the symbolic significance of the switch from garake to a smartphone, the often-unrealized nature of the imagined affordances of this shift (“it’s full of things that I don’t know”), and its connection to age (“it’s a really simple smartphone for old people”). Indeed, across all interviews, the term garake was consistently used to refer to the digital practices of older generations (in contrast to younger folks perceived as early smartphone adopters)—“I have heard that when people have grandchildren, they switch from garake to smartphone” (Naomi, woman in her 80s).
Furthermore, for older informants, the technological learning curve meant that the affordances of digital communication sometimes remained mostly imagined, even after switching from older to newer technology: “I bought [a smartphone] three months ago. I wanted to check my health. I wanted to have the health app, but I don’t use it yet” (Misaki, woman in her 60s); “I almost always call. I don’t know yet how to do other things” (Rina, woman in her 60s); “My friends who are over 65, they have smartphones but they don’t know how to use them, they don’t know how to send a picture. All they do is call” (Hiroki, man in his 60s); “I have a smartphone, but I only use it for calling and taking pictures. We can’t use all of these things, it’s too much information for us” (Sakura, woman in her 60s); “On my smartphone, I make calls and I check the weather. I also use the alarm, that’s about it” (Natsuki, woman in her 70s). As Mio, a woman in her 30s concluded, “My parents have smartphones, but they don’t know how to use them. [. . .] [A]ge makes a difference.”
Imagined disconnections: in the city they go “pit pit pit”
Geography also significantly intersected with members of the community’s imagined affordances of digital media. Most agreed that people in the countryside use technology differently than their more urban counterparts. They painted an image of city dwellers as busily engaged in the digital world: “If you go to Tokyo, almost everyone, wherever you go people are on their phone . . . Even when they’re riding their bicycle, they are looking at their phone, it’s scary!” (Hana, woman in her 50s): People who come from the city, they always have an iPad. And on their iPad, they enter everything, all of their data, everything they need is on their iPad. I don’t know about other companies but no one from the countryside in my company does that. That’s quite different. (Shingo, man in his 60s)
“They use devices more and they are on Facebook and Instagram more” (Eito, man in his 40s); “My image [of people in the city] is that they look very busy, they’re always searching something on their devices it seems” (Koharu, 42-year-old woman).
One frequently given reason for the more active use of digital technology in urban contexts was that there is a greater need for such devices in the city due to a number of factors ranging from longer commutes—“In urban areas, people have long train commutes, so during their commute, they might read a book online or listen to music on their phone” (Sakura, woman in her 60s)—to the simple fact that “In the big city, they have many events and many things that are going on, so they need more information” (Shinji, 38-year-old man).
City dwellers were also perceived as generally benefiting a lot more from digital media than people in more rural areas because, as Satomi (a woman in her 70s) summarized, “In the city, there are more things that they can do with their smartphones.” The fact that “people in the city” can use their phone to pay for the train, buy a snack at the station, or book concert tickets was a recurring theme in our conversations: “[I]n areas like Osaka, you can book a taxi with an app and there are ride sharing apps, but here we don’t have that . . . Also, to buy tickets for live concerts or events, around here all we have is paper tickets or a QR code” (Mei, woman in her 20s); “People in urban areas can use their phone to pay for everything. Here people still use cash” (Eito, man in his 40s); “It’s different. They can use their phones to pay. We can’t do that here” (Hisaki, woman in her 60s).
The following comment from Saki powerfully illustrates both the imagined nature of digital communication’s affordances and the sense of disconnection it generates for individuals who “can’t do that”: [In Tokyo] they can use their smartphone for everything, when riding the train, smartphone, when buying something at the convenience store, smartphone. They go “pit pit pit” [making the sound of placing a phone on a terminal], but here we’re not quite there yet . . . I really think there are a lot of differences but it’s difficult for me to explain exactly how it’s different, but I often hear about things. If you compare the countryside and urban areas, in urban areas there are many more ways to use your smartphone, so digital communication is much more of a plus in the everyday lives of people in urban areas.
In other words, members of the community’s experience of digital media was shaped not only by the imagined affordances available to them, but also by the imagination of what the technology afforded to individuals located in more urban privileged environments. While some, as Saki, longed for rural areas to “catch up” with more urban contexts, others chose to reject the technology altogether. As Hiroki, a man in his 60s, explained, [I]n the country, we don’t need these things . . . we can live without these things . . . we have space, we have nature, we have different things that we can do [. . .] if you’re in the city, you really need information, like information about stores or where things are happening, but here, we know these things, we don’t need the technology in our house, like the artificial intelligence that switches this or that on for you when you’re not home.
Or, as 42-year-old Kaoru concluded, “In the countryside, people aren’t checking their devices all the time. [. . .] I feel that we don’t have as much interest.” Either position, however, was premised on the assumption that urban and rural folks experience digital communication vastly differently.
It is important to note, however, that technology is quite widely available in the community, even if riding the train still requires a paper ticket, and people did use it extensively. As informants, including older ones, pulled out their phone to share photos of their latest trip or videos of the festival, took selfies and group photos, went to the translation app when we stumbled on a word, or as I witnessed them chat with their grandchildren on the iPad, it became clear that their relationship to digital media was far from passive. As Yuka, a woman in her 60s, put it, “Many years ago, when keitai started, I thought I would never use a keitai, but now everyone, even grandmothers like us are using smartphones.” Here, Yuka and other “grandmothers’” engagement with digital technology resonates with recent research in other contexts demonstrating that digital media play an important role in keeping older adults, particularly those with lowered mobility, connected to their social network, and that once they start using the technology it becomes a routine part of their lives (Quan-Haase et al., 2017).
Even the refusal to use the technology was often an active decision. As Aoi, a woman in her 60s, explained, “I used to have an Instagram account some years ago . . . But when I read about some popular Japanese drama, I got actually tired of reading other people’s comments, so I deleted my account.” To which her friend Yoko (also in her 60s) added “it’s a pain.” Making a hand gesture suggesting that she was protecting her face, 75-year-old Chisato similarly commented “I keep [my phone] off. That way I don’t have to answer” and proceeded to admit that she was “ghosting” a friend: “Our friend sends pictures every day. But we stopped answering so he doesn’t send them anymore.”
Finally, it is also worth noting that the sense of disconnection from more digitally plugged-in urban environments was mostly expressed by individuals who had never lived in such contexts. Those who had moved to the region from urban areas or had experience living elsewhere did not see much contrast. As 42-year-old Riku put it, “I just moved here from Osaka six months ago, so I don’t think it’s that different.” In other words, these “missed affordances” were largely imagined.
Thus, members of the community’s engagement with digital media (or lack thereof) simultaneously generated feelings of connection to loved ones and to a broader imagined online global community, and feelings of disconnection from urban and/or younger populations perceived as more able to tap into the technology’s full potential. While these often-contradictory sentiments may echo those of individuals in other parts the world, they were experienced and expressed in situated and cultural-specific ways.
Analysis and conclusion
This admittedly partial snapshot of digital media use in a Japanese rural community illustrates the complexity of individuals’ experiences when negotiating digital technology. Like people in other parts of the world who are privileged enough to have access to technology, members of the community have integrated digital media into their daily lives. They enjoyed and took advantage of the technology’s affordances to facilitate various tasks. Everyone agreed that being able to order groceries, check the weather, or verify if a store is open with only a few clicks on a mobile device is very convenient. A number of “vernacular” and “imagined” affordances shaped by individuals’ identities and sociocultural context also arose in our conversations.
In an effort to provide a concise theoretical framework through which to explore affordances, Davis and Chouinard (2016) suggest that we ask not only “how” affordances work, but also “for whom and under what circumstances?” (p. 244, emphasis in original). They offer a set of mechanisms—request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage and refuse—and interrelated conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy—as a model to consider these questions. Using this framework, the affordance of online shopping in the community may, for instance, not only be interpreted as “encouraging” its members to use digital platforms by “allowing” them access to goods and services previously deemed out of reach, but also as having reached a high level of “cultural legitimacy” due to the imagined “extra” benefits afforded to those in rural contexts—or to older, less mobile, folks. Similarly, the simultaneous feelings of connection and disconnection arising from individuals’ awareness of a global digital community can be linked to the fact that individuals were simultaneously “encouraged” to connect on a larger scale by the affordances of social media and “discouraged” by their frequent lack of “dexterity” and “perception.” Finally, feelings of being left out of the digital revolution were further shaped by individuals’ imagination of the technology’s affordances for those in more privileged urban contexts—what it “allowed” others to do. These feelings were particularly strong because of the perception that what the technology “allowed” for more educated urban dwellers was often “refused” to them—going “pit pit pit”—or at least “discouraged.”
This complex intersection of the actual and imagined mechanisms of affordance profoundly shaped the members of community’s involvement with technology. Perceived lack of “dexterity” and “perception” often translated into a more general sense of fear and alienation regarding the fast-paced nature of contemporary technological innovation and its impact on social organization. These feelings, in turn, impacted social media’s “institutional and cultural legitimacy” in the community as some individuals positioned themselves in opposition to “technologically obsessed urbanites.”
The complexity of individuals’ relationship to digital media points, as Pearce and Vitak (2016: 2607) argue, to the continuing “need for scholars to explore and contextualize the positive and negative affordances of different types of social media.” Including varied situated accounts of digital praxis into our analyses is a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world. Only then can we, in turn, “imagine a future influenced by a number of voices that have almost always been left out of the conversation about how technologies are created and used” (Srinivasan, 2017: 29).
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Summer Research Award from Temple University.
Notes
Author biography
Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Professor of Journalism and Director of the Media and Communication Doctoral Program in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research focuses on global media flows and processes of transnational cultural influence and their intersection with dynamics of gender, class, race and ethnicity. Her book Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West (2015, Michigan University Press) was awarded the International Communication Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2016.