Presenter: Mark McLelland
Abstract: ‘Researching the Japanese Internet’
Despite the fact that the once dominant position the English language occupied as the primary language of the Internet is being constantly eroded by the emergence of Internet cultures in other languages, surprisingly little research has been published in English on these emerging language communities. In 2001 47.6% of the online population was using English. In 2004 this had slipped to 38.5% (http://www.global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3). The two largest language populations after English are currently Chinese (14.1%) and Japanese (9.6%), languages rarely spoken or read by native English speakers who are not also of Chinese or Japanese ancestry. While Chinese, like English, functions as a lingua franca for a disparate population of mainly ethnic Chinese resident in geographically dispersed locations such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and the US, the Japanese language is much more closely associated with Japanese nationality (not simply ethnicity) and the vast majority of websites in Japanese are hosted by servers in Japan. As Gottleib notes, "In the case of the Japanese script, geographical location remains very much a predictor of social practice and preference" - material published in the Japanese language whether in print or on the Internet, tends to originate in Japan and speak to specifically Japanese concerns.
As a non-ethnic Japanese researcher of Japan whose primary use of the Internet is in Japanese, I find much conventional Internet research which is based on models developed through investigation of English-language users to be unhelpful when investigating Japanese Internet communities and practices. This presentation offers a brief history of the development of the Internet in Japan, discusses some of the particularities of Japanese Internet use and offers a case study of one Japanese online community - Japanese transgenders. In so doing, I suggest that the investigation of non-European language communities on the Internet is an important new direction for Internet researchers.
Bio
Dr Mark McLelland is an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. Mark is the author of Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan : Cultural Myths and Social Realities ( RoutledgeCurzon, 2000) and co-editor of the collections Japanese Cybercultures (Routledge, 2003), Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Modern Japan (Routledge, in press) and Queer Voices from Japan ( Lexington , forthcoming).
He has published numerous journal papers and book chapters on the intersections between gender, sexuality and new technologies in Japan. Mark is also a co-founder and convener of AsiaPacifiQueer, a network of Australia-based researchers who work on queer histories and cultures in the Asia-Pacific region. Mark's new monograph Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age will be released by Rowman and Littlefield in April 2005.