WaiWai From the Inside: Part II

A translation of Part II of Sasaki's CNET Japan article has been posted. In this installment, Sasaki fleshes out the war between the internet and mass media, describes a meeting with senior management at the Mainichi, and cautions against calling the newspaper's critics trolls

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Excerpt:

Net users are not “trolls”

However, the majority of 2-Channel users, bloggers and Hatena bookmarks users expressing themselves on the net are not this sort of “troll.” The net world is of course far from flat. There are people who produce content such as high-quality blog posts and other creative works, as well as influencers, people who accurately critique this content. There are also people who support these influencers, or criticize, post bookmarks, and add comments. In addition, there are also those who do not have their own view, who are easily swayed by other people’s opinions and blindly follow the flow. The net is organized according to this layered structure, and it is through the collective of the infocommons (information sharing zone) that the space for discussion on the net has developed to become what it is today.

Many of these guys are moreover (probably) people living a proper life, and while the net population has expanded to the size it is today, they have been reduced to less than a minority group in society. And now they have become a force strong enough to be considered the majority. In this state of affairs, public opinion on the net is coming ever closer to matching real public opinion, and to ignore this world makes even the formation of public opinion unreliable. And, for better or worse, the net world has a weapon in its hands — namely, the telephone pressure campaign — that can be used to influence the real world. It would seem that the expansion of the war front from the internet to the real world will progress further and further in the future.

Newspapers, on the other hand, do not for the most part recognize this fact. Not only do they fail to recognize it, they remain under the impression that “net users are just some creepy minority crowd.” To make matters worse, they are utterly swayed by nice-sounding expressions that are in vogue like “throwing fuel on the fire,” and to top it off they are hobbled by their inappropriate and bizarre way of dealing with the net. I can only describe this as pathetic. In the end, it is they who are being completely “dominated” and manipulated by the net.

In fact, the reaction to the article in PJ News titled “‘We are not able to answer questions from internet-related media’: Mainichi Daily News rejection of search engines” suggests that the newspaper’s failure to respond to reporters and its control of information has actually managed to beautifully “throw fuel on the fire.”

Read Part II.

So, not only was the Mainichi in a lot of trouble for printing sleaze in the WaiWai column, but it was hostile to its critics. Granted, the bulk of its critics were probably anonymous, but had the Mainichi come clean about WaiWai, they might have avoided a lot of grief for themselves. Instead, their attempts to cover their tracks and treat its critics with derision only added fuel to the fire. How does a newspaper stay in business if it doesn't have any readers again?