Just like here in the U.S., people in Japan have easy access to the Internet either from their home, library, or place called Internet Café. The difference between the U.S. and Japan in terms of the access to the Internet would be the fact that Japanese cell phone has strong 3G network and many young people have access to the Internet through their cell phone.
Since everyone has the access to the Internet, citizen journalism seems quite active in Japan. After earthquake and tsunami hit northern part of Japan, the role of social network websites under crisis has gotten more attention than ever before. Indeed, while telephone network was down because of the disaster, the Internet was the most strong and stable network to transmit information. [1]
Although it was almost proven that the Internet and social network website have become one of the most important inflations, the Internet does still have problems because of its ability to transmit any information. Nikkei News tells that there was a lot of false information transmitted on twitter under the panic. [2] Even though some of false information causes panic, it seems that most of false information was transmitted by people’s virtue and hope to help out people.
Traditional media made use of new tools such as twitter and video sharing websites as well. In fact, tweets by accounts of raditional media such as NHK (Japanese national TV channel) were highly valued among the flood of information whose authenticity is unclear. Moreover, video sharing website called “Nikoniko Doga” stream several TV channel for people who do not have access to TV but can use the Internet. [3] Therefore, it seems that citizen journalism is still weaker compared with traditional media in terms of the authenticity of information, though citizen journalism did play a big role to convey personal information such as missing people and their actual experience.
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