Page 290 - Culture Technology Communication

“Culture,” Computer Literacy, and the Media 273

on-line services. The “swear room” allows abusive language, but
with the intent of giving users a space to vent their anger as a way
to relieve stress. It thus tries to channel the urge to use abusive lan-
guage in chat rooms into a form of on-line therapy (Kim 1998).
These observations, taken together, suggest a clear difference
between Korean and Japanese cultures—with Korea comparatively
more supportive of CMC than Japan. To explain this difference, the
culture theory would be driven towards portraying Japan as a na-
tion of “cyber-Luddites” or “technophobes.” Evidence from other
fields suggests the opposite. Japan was one of the first countries in
the world to embrace high-speed trains. The fax machine caught on
rapidly in Japan, and, according to the Nomura survey (Table 2),
20.2% of Japanese have a private fax machine, the highest of the
four nations surveyed. Mobile phone usage in Japan is also high,
with 35.7% of the respondents in the Nomura survey saying that
they use a mobile phone. Another 25.3% of the respondents have a
mobile phone in their household, but do not use it personally. Thus,
61% of the respondents said that they have a mobile phone in their
household. This compares with 38% in the United States and 39.4%
in Korea. Indeed, along with the Scandinavian countries, Hong
Kong, and Singapore, Japan has one of the highest rates of mobile
phone diffusion in the world. But if the culture theory seeks to ex-
plain more negative attitudes towards CMC in Japan as a function
of an anti-technological “culture,” these additional data directly con-
tradict such an explanation. Indeed, this contrast between Japanese
attitudes towards CMC and other technologies suggests that “cul-
ture” may be too general and vague as a concept to adequately ex-
plain such divergent attitudes within the same culture.
The second theory, the computer-literacy theory, focuses on how
computer literacy and a variety of practical considerations, such as
the cost of machinery and on-line time, affect attitudes toward the
Internet and CMC in Japan and Korea. Though these issues have
been discussed at length by proponents of the Internet, they have
rarely been discussed in cross-cultural comparisons.
The spread of CMC faces several major obstacles in Japan, the
first of which is the difficulty of inputting Japanese into a word
processor. The problem is simple: the writing system requires two
stages of inputting, which slows typing and makes it difficult for
users to participate in chat rooms. Regardless of which system is
used to input Japanese into the computer, users must press the
space bar to bring up the desired combinations of Chinese charac-
ters, which are then entered into the text by pressing the enter key.