Face to face: on‐line subjectivity in contemporary Japan

Merleau-Ponty argues that for a blind person the cane becomes an extension of the realm of the senses. The cane, in other words, fills in for what the blind person lacks in apprehending the world. In cyberspace, the computer user as represented on the screen lacks a body—a phenomenon that Murray and Sixsmith term "disrupted bodies" (1999). This paper analyses the compensations made for the "disrupted bodies" of Japanese computer subjects by asking the following questions: what kinds of extensions of the body might there be in computer-mediated communication; how might these extensions be culturally embedded; and how do these bodily extensions shape the communities of which they are a part? We take as a case study the frequent use of kaomoji (literally, face marks; known in computer studies as emoticons)—manipulations of keyboard symbols to create faces—by email and Internet users in Japan. Our methods include surveys of Internet users in Japan, face-to-face and online interviews, and participant observation in chatrooms from June through November 2001, as well as hard-copy and electronic archival research. We first administered a survey (see Appendix A) by email among 14 informants from acquaintances and contacts in Tokyo, divided equally by gender and across age groups from 19 to 50 year-olds. These initial respondents then circulated the same survey to their acquaintances, who ranged in age from their teens to their seventies. In all, we gathered data from 68 surveys. Furthermore, we conducted 6 online and 3 face-to-face interviews with the survey respondents. Although there has been much written about online communities and identities, relatively little research has been conducted on the tools of those communities and identities—here specifically the emoticon—graphic symbols of emotion drawn from elements commonly found on computer keyboards (Witmer and Katzman 1998; Sugimoto and Levin 2000). Emoticons originated in the United States in 1980 with the smiley, variously depicted as :-) or :) (Sanderson