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imomusExhibit 1: Here are three user images grabbed, pretty much at random, from Japanese networking site Mixi.
Notice anything? That's right. None of them actually shows a human face.
Okay, this happens in the West too. Many LiveJournal icons show fluffy kittens or other avatars rather than the user's real face. If we look at yesterday's Click Opera comments, for instance, we find that many of them (Jordan Fish, Charles Hatcher and myself are the exceptions) use avatars, stock images, correlatives designed to reveal something about the user's personality and interests without rubbing our face, so to speak, in her face. Since yesterday's comments were responding to a video in which I showed my face, it's interesting that two of the Anon comments, one from the US, the other from the UK, actually criticized me for showing myself. "Someone likes the sound of his own voice," said the American comment. The British one merely linked to an image of Narcissus.
So people all over the world have mixed feelings about showing their face on the internet. Some love to, others cringe away from it. But I'm particularly interested, today, in why it's done so little in Japan. Which brings us to...
Exhibit 2: In this video exchange, victorintheworld, based in the US, raises exactly the question of why Japanese are so afraid of showing their faces. cecilcut, a Japanese man, answers:
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Victor's "rant" is half-comical, half-serious. Why the hell do people who've been brave enough to be samurais, he asks, claim to be shy, embarrassed or scared of something so simple as putting their face online? Cecil replies, first justifying, with typically Japanese self-deprecation, why he's showing his own face in a video: he has no talent for writing, painting, music or art. He's also not good at video, he says, but in this field there are few Japanese to show up his lack of skill. (It's worth noting that YouTube hasn't launched yet with a fully-Japanese interface. There are few Japanese vloggers.) Cecil won't declare showing your face better than writing. Overall, he thinks it's not necessary to show your face to give your opinion -- it can be fun, but that's all. There are various ways to enjoy the internet. (Cecil not only self-deprecates, he tries to put several alternative points of view, again very Japanese; this allows for concensus. Total contrast to Victor's rant, although Victor does allow that he may be "frightening" his audience.)
This is where Cecil swings into gear with his main point: Japan's biggest bulletin board, 2ch, has changed online behaviour, he thinks. Anonymous detractors on 2ch won't just criticize what you say, they'll cut down your personality and everything about you. Cecil doesn't mind YouTubers saying he's made a boring video or something, but over on 2ch they just tear everything down. So he understands why people don't want to show their faces. Victor shouldn't be so hard on the reticent. "I'm sorry the way my opinion turned out," Cecil tells Victor, "it sounds like I'm disagreeing with you." Again, he self-deprecates out of that conflict -- if the kind of interesting Japanese Victor is demanding started emerging, jokes Cecil, "there will be no place for me. So please don't come, more interesting Japanese! There are many ways to express yourself without showing your face. So I'm looking forward to seeing those. Please entertain me!"
Exhibit 3: I asked Hisae, who translated Cecil's views, what she thought of them. She agreed with him. There's no need for people to show their faces, it seems like they're just showing off if they do. Sure, if you want to get comments that you're cute, or you want to find a boyfriend, do it. (Okay, at this point I think I'll insert a photo of me and Laila France, having dinner with Hisae -- not pictured -- last night. Not because I want to flirt or show off, but because it might interest people who've heard the record we made exactly ten years ago. Laila plans to move to Berlin and is here apartment-hunting. After dinner we went to a club, where a Japanese guy came up to me with the line "You're that guy from the internet!")
Hisae continues: MySpace just launched in Japan, she says, and it seems to attract more show-offy people who show their faces. They're somehow people with connection with the West, she thinks, or people who stayed in other countries for a while. This interests me -- is Rupert Murdoch undermining yet another country with his invasive mores? Just how successful is MySpace Japan so far? Are the people on there the "interesting Japanese" that Cecil hopes don't emerge (despite the fact that he seems to be one of the face-showers himself)?
I think it's time we invited a marketer into the conversation.
Exhibit 4: Clast is a website of market data on Japanese consumer behaviour, a "market segmentation tool" in blog form. Perhaps if we cut through the marketing jargon (CGM = consumer-generated media, ie self-made videos on YouTube etc) it can tell us something about Japanese reluctance to show faces online? Clast's W. David Marx writes:
"Japanese user-originated visual media - on YouTube at least - has almost always been primarily TV clips and never included any of the "kids lip syncing" type videos that litter the American contributions." He notes "a reluctance to upload "true" CGM on the consumer side". A sample of YouTube clips reveals "original or semi-original content that does not necessarily visually reveal or feature the creators themselves. Very little CGM in Japan has launched the creators to the mainstream media level, but this may be a mixture of the relatively low-quality of the content, the limited scope of the humor, and the closed-nature of the Japanese entertainment world."
Mr Marx concludes: "We should see more and more of this kind of "anonymous" CGM on the net in the future, but it is unclear at this point whether it will become a force bold enough to really warrant the kind of "Person of the Year" praise that Web 2.0 won in the U.S. last year."
Exhibit 5: Finding the explanatory value of this somewhat limited, I turn to Kaiping Peng, a cultural psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley. In a fascinating pdf excerpted from the Oxford University Press' Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Peng lays out what I think are the real reasons for Japan's online facelessness.
He cites Hofstede's individualism-collectivism dimension, and says that self is a cultural concept, perhaps the most important cultural concept. Western Europe and the USA, Peng says, stress an independent self, whereas Asian societies stress an interdependent self. Whereas Westerners tend to be dispositional (in other words, to attribute things to inherent traits of personality -- like Victor telling the Japanese not to be shy because they're samurai), Asians tend to be relational -- to explain things in terms of relationships. (Interesting: the word "relational" has come up a lot on Click Opera this week in reference to an emerging art practice in the West, "Relational Aesthetics", which focuses not on fixed, unchanging objects but on contexts and social networks.)
In Asian societies, says Peng (who worked at University of Beijing before coming to California), "self-identity is more socially-diffused across important others rather than strictly bounded with the individual... We might crudely characterize the slogan of collectivism as “my in-group is important” while an interdependent self might be described as “my in-group is who I am.”
You can see where this is going: why show an individual when you could show a relationship, a network, a group? Why show an object when you could show a field, a person when you could show a context? Why be dispositional when you could be relational? Are we in the West becoming more "Japanese" or are they becoming more "Western"? Personally, I find cultural psychology, with its fascinating experiments, the best explanation for the hiddenness of Japanese faces online. Or maybe my good friend Narcissus just never made it that far East?
Notice anything? That's right. None of them actually shows a human face.
Okay, this happens in the West too. Many LiveJournal icons show fluffy kittens or other avatars rather than the user's real face. If we look at yesterday's Click Opera comments, for instance, we find that many of them (Jordan Fish, Charles Hatcher and myself are the exceptions) use avatars, stock images, correlatives designed to reveal something about the user's personality and interests without rubbing our face, so to speak, in her face. Since yesterday's comments were responding to a video in which I showed my face, it's interesting that two of the Anon comments, one from the US, the other from the UK, actually criticized me for showing myself. "Someone likes the sound of his own voice," said the American comment. The British one merely linked to an image of Narcissus.
So people all over the world have mixed feelings about showing their face on the internet. Some love to, others cringe away from it. But I'm particularly interested, today, in why it's done so little in Japan. Which brings us to...
Exhibit 2: In this video exchange, victorintheworld, based in the US, raises exactly the question of why Japanese are so afraid of showing their faces. cecilcut, a Japanese man, answers:
[Error: unknown template video]
[Error: unknown template video]
Victor's "rant" is half-comical, half-serious. Why the hell do people who've been brave enough to be samurais, he asks, claim to be shy, embarrassed or scared of something so simple as putting their face online? Cecil replies, first justifying, with typically Japanese self-deprecation, why he's showing his own face in a video: he has no talent for writing, painting, music or art. He's also not good at video, he says, but in this field there are few Japanese to show up his lack of skill. (It's worth noting that YouTube hasn't launched yet with a fully-Japanese interface. There are few Japanese vloggers.) Cecil won't declare showing your face better than writing. Overall, he thinks it's not necessary to show your face to give your opinion -- it can be fun, but that's all. There are various ways to enjoy the internet. (Cecil not only self-deprecates, he tries to put several alternative points of view, again very Japanese; this allows for concensus. Total contrast to Victor's rant, although Victor does allow that he may be "frightening" his audience.)
This is where Cecil swings into gear with his main point: Japan's biggest bulletin board, 2ch, has changed online behaviour, he thinks. Anonymous detractors on 2ch won't just criticize what you say, they'll cut down your personality and everything about you. Cecil doesn't mind YouTubers saying he's made a boring video or something, but over on 2ch they just tear everything down. So he understands why people don't want to show their faces. Victor shouldn't be so hard on the reticent. "I'm sorry the way my opinion turned out," Cecil tells Victor, "it sounds like I'm disagreeing with you." Again, he self-deprecates out of that conflict -- if the kind of interesting Japanese Victor is demanding started emerging, jokes Cecil, "there will be no place for me. So please don't come, more interesting Japanese! There are many ways to express yourself without showing your face. So I'm looking forward to seeing those. Please entertain me!"
Exhibit 3: I asked Hisae, who translated Cecil's views, what she thought of them. She agreed with him. There's no need for people to show their faces, it seems like they're just showing off if they do. Sure, if you want to get comments that you're cute, or you want to find a boyfriend, do it. (Okay, at this point I think I'll insert a photo of me and Laila France, having dinner with Hisae -- not pictured -- last night. Not because I want to flirt or show off, but because it might interest people who've heard the record we made exactly ten years ago. Laila plans to move to Berlin and is here apartment-hunting. After dinner we went to a club, where a Japanese guy came up to me with the line "You're that guy from the internet!")
Hisae continues: MySpace just launched in Japan, she says, and it seems to attract more show-offy people who show their faces. They're somehow people with connection with the West, she thinks, or people who stayed in other countries for a while. This interests me -- is Rupert Murdoch undermining yet another country with his invasive mores? Just how successful is MySpace Japan so far? Are the people on there the "interesting Japanese" that Cecil hopes don't emerge (despite the fact that he seems to be one of the face-showers himself)?
I think it's time we invited a marketer into the conversation.
Exhibit 4: Clast is a website of market data on Japanese consumer behaviour, a "market segmentation tool" in blog form. Perhaps if we cut through the marketing jargon (CGM = consumer-generated media, ie self-made videos on YouTube etc) it can tell us something about Japanese reluctance to show faces online? Clast's W. David Marx writes:
"Japanese user-originated visual media - on YouTube at least - has almost always been primarily TV clips and never included any of the "kids lip syncing" type videos that litter the American contributions." He notes "a reluctance to upload "true" CGM on the consumer side". A sample of YouTube clips reveals "original or semi-original content that does not necessarily visually reveal or feature the creators themselves. Very little CGM in Japan has launched the creators to the mainstream media level, but this may be a mixture of the relatively low-quality of the content, the limited scope of the humor, and the closed-nature of the Japanese entertainment world."
Mr Marx concludes: "We should see more and more of this kind of "anonymous" CGM on the net in the future, but it is unclear at this point whether it will become a force bold enough to really warrant the kind of "Person of the Year" praise that Web 2.0 won in the U.S. last year."
Exhibit 5: Finding the explanatory value of this somewhat limited, I turn to Kaiping Peng, a cultural psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley. In a fascinating pdf excerpted from the Oxford University Press' Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Peng lays out what I think are the real reasons for Japan's online facelessness.
He cites Hofstede's individualism-collectivism dimension, and says that self is a cultural concept, perhaps the most important cultural concept. Western Europe and the USA, Peng says, stress an independent self, whereas Asian societies stress an interdependent self. Whereas Westerners tend to be dispositional (in other words, to attribute things to inherent traits of personality -- like Victor telling the Japanese not to be shy because they're samurai), Asians tend to be relational -- to explain things in terms of relationships. (Interesting: the word "relational" has come up a lot on Click Opera this week in reference to an emerging art practice in the West, "Relational Aesthetics", which focuses not on fixed, unchanging objects but on contexts and social networks.)
In Asian societies, says Peng (who worked at University of Beijing before coming to California), "self-identity is more socially-diffused across important others rather than strictly bounded with the individual... We might crudely characterize the slogan of collectivism as “my in-group is important” while an interdependent self might be described as “my in-group is who I am.”
You can see where this is going: why show an individual when you could show a relationship, a network, a group? Why show an object when you could show a field, a person when you could show a context? Why be dispositional when you could be relational? Are we in the West becoming more "Japanese" or are they becoming more "Western"? Personally, I find cultural psychology, with its fascinating experiments, the best explanation for the hiddenness of Japanese faces online. Or maybe my good friend Narcissus just never made it that far East?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 10:55 am (UTC)Not at all. It's by no means clear that the Japanese are less likely to expose their faces, and your anecdotal evidence from a couple of popular Japanese networking sites does nothing to definitively prove the point. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that exposing one's face in the West can be frowned upon, seen as overly narcissistic and attention-seeking: vide the comments your last post elicited. The fact is, your relentless visual self-exposure on this site is not really typical of how other people in the West use livejournal and forums and the like. (I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's not what people in general do).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 11:03 am (UTC)"If things were the other way round, if it were the Japanese who put their face on the Net more..."
AND THEN say
"It's by no means clear that the Japanese are less likely to expose their faces..."
CONTRADICTION!
(Sorry for being so cognitively Western here, and refusing to allow contradictions in your organic thinking... Okay, you don't accept the premise, AND you want to show that I would be able to argue the opposite equally well. Thank you!)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 11:10 am (UTC)My point, in strictly logical terms (and a general summary of Click Opera:
1) Momus has pet theory.
2) Momus puts forward proposition, which may or may not be true, but supports it with flimsy anecdotal evidence which does nothing to elucidate its truthfulness/falseness.
3) Momus then welds pet theory onto proposition in a fairly arbitrary way.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 11:18 am (UTC)So you and I are, if not in agreement, on the same page!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 11:46 am (UTC)Where's the evidence again? I think I read all the comments to Momus' last entry and I don't remember anyone suggesting that Westerners hide their faces in photos. And certainly, to the extent that I've photo'ed people, I've seen little evidence to support your claim.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-23 12:03 pm (UTC)Behind that binary of mutual definition, though, the Muslim and Christian worlds share deep original taboos on the revelation of faces, bodies and names. Which isn't too surprising, considering how closely their religions are related.