The exchange of symbols through technical media (Thompson 1995: 31) is seen as one of the most important pathways to encounter distant others and develop an attitude of openness and responsibility towards them, known as cosmopolitanism. Kaori Hayashi maintained that Japanese mass media fail to contribute to the development of such attitude as they are constrained both by the demands of domestic market and the government (Hayashi 2011).
If mass media’s potential as a locus of cosmopolitanism is limited, it is necessary to examine other elements of Japan’s media landscape in which the influence of the above-mentioned factors would be less prominent. Online communication has been regarded as a forum where users deliberate and connect to distant others, albeit in a form different from Jurgen Habermas’s vision of a singular public sphere (Habermas 1962=2008; Bruns 2018). Zizi Papacharissi has argued that places “away from singularity of a public sphere” are “more hospitable to a globalized spectrum of issues” and are better suited for the demands of cosmopolitanism (Papacharissi 2010: 118).
This study is an analysis of Japanese Twitter discourse on Ukraine, a country still grappling with the consequences of an armed conflict, which took lives of more than 13 thousand people. Following Zizi Papacharissi’s (2014) mixed-method approach to the examination of Twitter-mediated communication, this study conducted topic modeling of 19865 Japanese-language tweets, resulting in a model with 16 topics, which were further grouped in “public” and “private”. For each topic, discursive analysis of random sample of 200 tweets was carried out. The findings suggest that such media tendencies as conceiving of developments in distant places through the prism of international politics dominated by conflicting national interests, were the most prominent. However, there were tweets where users combined their private interest with public concerns about Ukraine’s residents, suggesting that performances of the self on Twitter (Marwick and boyd 2011) may serve as a foundation for the attitude of openness and responsibility towards distant others.
References
Bruns, Axel. 2018. Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. New York: Peter Lang.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hayashi, Kaori.2011. “Questioning Journalism Ethics in the Global Age. How Japanese News Media Report and Support Immigrant Law Revision.” In Blackwell Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Robert S Fortner and P. Mark Fackler. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–33.
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2010. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Digital Media and Society. Cambridge; Malden: Polity.
———. 2014. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.