As I explained in Chapter Four, field notes from my participant-observation as an insider at the research site were either made in a research notebook and later transferred to digital form, or were input directly into a digital document in a word processing software program called Scrivener. My notes spanned the entire research period, from the time I began formulating research questions to my data collection phase, and through to the final write-up of my thesis. The notes covered many topics and varied in length: some were based on very brief observations of student behaviors and practices in physical campus spaces; other field notes were jotted down as I learned more about the host institution through reading digital and paper documents; other notes were made after interactions in virtual spaces such as LINE groups that I was a part of with students; finally, a significant portion of my notes were attempts to relate what I observed and experienced at the research site to theories and concepts I was encountering in the literature I was reading and processing at the same time.
Some portions of what I observed in my field notes made it into the body of this thesis in some form or another. For example, relevant information that I noted from readings about the institution is included in Chapter Two: The Research Site in its Cultural-historical Context. Also, some of my
methodological and theoretical (ontological) decisions were informed by field notes I wrote which reflected upon the relevance of readings on social practice theory to what I was observing at the research site. Finally, my observations about students’ behaviors in physical spaces and in virtual LINE groups were a significant foundation for the analysis I provide in Chapter Seven.
To illustrate the value of my field notes to this thesis, below I share some passages from these in the aforementioned areas: notes related to the physical and virtual spaces inhabited by students, notes related to student practices in these spaces, and notes related to connections between
theoretical constructs of “practice” and my own cross-cultural observations at the research site.
The campus and built environment.
The campus is set within what might be called a semi-urban area. Much of the inhabited southeast coast of Kanto (island) could be described this way though, so this is a distinction that lacks descriptive power. Transportation hubs seem to dictate levels of urbanization on Kanto. This campus is set about seven kilometers from the city central Japan Railway (JR) station in a mostly residential neighborhood. A stop on the main (Tokaidō) JR line that
connects to this station is approximately two kilometers away. The same train line runs all the way to Tokyo to the Northeast, and Osaka to the Southwest. But scanning the landscape from campus makes these metropoles seem very distant indeed. With the exception of the campus buildings themselves, few nearby buildings reach more than two or three stories. A few nearby shops and restaurants and an old “shotengai” (shopping street) exist a few blocks away. Though the area bustles with car and pedestrian traffic during the day, it is clearly a peripheral (suburban) zone.
Campus is on a hill and adjacent to one of the university organization’s high schools. There are four main buildings on campus: three connected buildings house classrooms and faculty and administrative offices, a cafeteria, and a few student-focused “centers”: the Career Support Center, the Teacher Education Center, and the Foreign Language Learning Self- Access Center. The fourth building is a (Buddhist) retreat center used by member schools in the larger organizational group, and also for the 1st year
students’ annual 2-day retreat (every February). The main campus structure is tripartite: an 11- floor tower flanked by two four-story buildings. The two main administrative offices are on the second floor of the main building, on either side of the main entrance. Other than these two centralized offices, use of the rest of the campus does not seem to be governed by any inherent special logic. Classrooms and faculty offices can be found throughout the rest of the campus. The Art and Design Faculty has a few main computer
and drafting rooms consolidated on two floors of building 3, but classrooms and offices for other faculties are not organized spatially.
There is only one access road up the hill and down the other side, and so the campus is somewhat isolated from the surrounding residences and businesses. However, the surrounding area is not at all vibrant. Only a few nearby restaurants, and many that have come and gone. As students and teachers just take public transportation, bicycles, motorbikes, or cars in and out of the university campus, it does not seem to have much positive economic impact on the immediate neighborhood within which it resides. Very much a commuter university. Students tend to come on the days they have classes (weekdays), and leave when their last class ends if they don’t have club activities or other commitments.
Student CMC practice via LINE
Participating in several one-to-one and group LINE correspondences, I have noticed several features that seem to be a part of the communication culture here. One is the use of timestamps and “read” marks (read
receipts). This seems to create a high degree of reciprocity for
interlocutors. With email, we send out missives without knowing whether they have been received, or, if so, when; but with LINE we know this information immediately. Once we can see that the message has been read, we can know that interlocutor feels some pressure to respond in a timely fashion. By the same token, when I receive a message I’m very aware if I have read it that I am going to need to respond sometime
relatively soon. This creates a higher degree of intimacy between people correspond this local social network app. This intimacy is especially pronounced in two-person dialogues, like the one I’ve had with K. But I’ve noticed that in large group conversations like those that take place in the ultimate frisbee LINE group, the timestamp loses its responsibility
producing power. In fact, as in face to face large groups, responsibility seems to decrease as the population of the group increases. What can be said in larger spaces is also limited because of all the eyes watching. I’ve experienced situations where a message I’ve sent can be seen as “read” by 10 or more people, but no one responds. This would never happen in a two-person conversation on LINE. More likely, as was the case recently with H, the person will ignore messages altogether, never opening them from the preview screen, and thus avoiding the “read” mark that implies responsibility.
Stickers and emoji are an integral part of LINE communication. They are constantly used to say ‘thanks’ or ‘understood’ or ‘onegaishimasu’ (please) in a way that conveys additional emotion: whimsy, cuteness, sincerity, humor, etc. They offer an alternative to words, or a supplement, that creates an atmosphere for conversations that would be missing from text-only communication. Also, by using stickers and emoji to perform speech acts such as requests, apologies, and expressions of gratitude, interlocuters can perform the acts outside of the Japanese linguistic and cultural frame. Recently a student of mine used and Evian sticker to say “merci” to thank
me and others in an asynchronous class discussion within LINE. As a middle-class American English speaker, I grew up knowing aware of how one says “thank you” in French. It is less clear that all of the students’ classmates would know this, or recognize the utterance. But in the chat, accompanied by a sticker of a caricaturized fashionable young French woman, the impression of thanks, and also of a stylish expression was clear (to me at least). It strikes me that students are constantly encountering multilingual messaging such as this in many places online, and here in the case of LINE stickers (and the LINE sticker store), they are able to appropriate these signs at will for various purposes, to perform various functions.
On Twitter semi-anonymity
It seems that when there are avenues for semi-anonymity online they are taken by students and others in online communities. By semi-anonymity, I mean the use of online monikers that are known to a peer group, but anonymous to the broader community of users. In the case of LINE, user IDs are tied to mobile telephone numbers, and social networks seem to grow through face to face contact. Sharing QR codes is the most common way to connect that I have observed. But Twitter’s architecture is based on network connections that can expand irrespective of geography. And so when opting to join such a network, it’s been my observation that Japanese students inevitably choose this semi-anonymous model for interacting on the platform. I have learned of several of my students’ online Twitter handles,
but have never seen one that uses the student’s “real” identity. Whether this is done out of digital “savvy” or some other reason, I am not yet sure . . .
On Connecting Theory to Empirical Observations and Reflections
For this project, I have chosen a theoretical approach based in the CHAT tradition, but with theoretical tools borrowed from contemporary practice theory. Looking at practices as repeated social actions helps ground my observations in the real world, but the framework also presents challenges because of the transcultural, translingistic, and transdisciplinary nature of my project. With the use of narrative frames I have tried to privilege the emic perspectives of the participants in my study in their native language. However, this in turn leaves a significant amount of interpretive work to be done via translation. Translation, however, is widely recognized as a somewhat subjective and interpretive act. This is why machines continue to fail in all but the simplest, transactional types of translation work. Contextual factors always have a strong influence on how language is interpreted and translated into a foreign language, and thus something is always, as the saying goes, “lost.” I am conscious of this inevitable loss, but am also trying in this work to find and reveal something to an English- reading audience: the culturally and linguistically informed perspectives of students who are in the process of becoming bilingual consumers and producers of digital language in social networks. They are developing social and literacy practices that are intricately entwined with the mandates of global consumer culture, and thus the ways they perceive information and their own practices is important to understand. However, labeling
practices become difficult in a cross-cultural and cross-linguistics research context. Whose labels and whose conceptual frameworks should be privileged, and how are questions I continue to wrestle with, but I have found thinking in terms of practices and perceptions of practice to be an apt heuristic for understanding the social world around me as a researcher. Inevitably, as my thesis is written in English, ultimately the terms and
sense of this social world will turn on my own academic socialization in three interdisciplinary fields: I have academic training in the field of area studies, with a focus on Asia; TESOL/applied linguistics in the
Sociocultural tradition, and now Educational Research, where I am trying to map out territory between Educational Sociology and Literacy studies. I am doing this in English while also making sense of the social world within which I am embedded with and through the Japanese language. Such a “situation” yields concepts and embodied ways of understanding the world that don’t always easily translate to any one academic tradition. However, in order for local knowledge to avoid the colonization of what Phillipson terms “linguistic imperialism,” I believe this hybridity may actually be apt.