What a fantastic entry! This left me reflecting on all sorts of things pertaining to linguistic anthropology, most especially how presence casting and short-form messaging could be related back to narrative studies. Also, what does this say about identity? agency? traditional ethnographic methods and the newly minted “netnography”?

I am accustomed to thinking–ideally, admittedly–of both narrative and “identity” as whole, integrated units. But both, in the cyber realm, are becoming increasingly fractured. This is compounded, of course, by the myriad forums in which many of us participate on a daily basis–and the prevalence of online anonymity.

While this is not the best forum for exploring these thoughts, I want to thank you for providing a useful rubric by which I getter get a handle on them. I know that a graduate student at the U. of Buffalo immediately incorporated your concept of presence casting into her dissertation work. For every one of us who take the time to comment on such insightful entries as yours, there are many more lurking in the sidelines who likewise benefit.

Keep it up! Both of your entries to date have been a most welcomed addition to Savage Minds.

In the first, I am asking a senior advertising executive, a member of the “burning” or “greying corporate warrior” generation what he thinks of young Japanese. He says that they are too shinshiteki, i.e., too gentlemanly. They live in their own bubbles and do everything they can to avoid conflict. He tells me that in his generation, “We were so eager to understand what other people were thinking that we trampled into each others hearts with our shoes on.

In another conversation, recorded in one of the HILL newsletters translated for the book, a young man says that he never quarrels with people. It would be like pissing on a frog, i.e., a complete waste of time.

These sorts of observations suggest a twist on the significance of phatic communication that you might want to look into. Another researcher suggests that young people are commodifying themselves. They dress up to present themselves in public like products on convenience store shelves. They want to be noticed without having to take the initiative to interact with others.
I wonder how this relates to presence-casting.

I find the interchange here between Erin and John fascinating. It’s hard for me to read the tone (Are they being serious or sarcastic?). Still, Erin’s Zen brief comment raises questions I can’t resist that, in this tone-deaf context, I’ll have get at in parable.

When first in graduate school, I was perplexed and often flummoxed by the volley of Q&A after academic talks. A colleague noticed my suffering and comforted me by explaining that whenever someone makes a comment or asks a question in a forum like this, what they’re really asking is, “What about me?” While I’ve found that nugget valuable to interpreting such speech events ever since, it certainly does not deprive these interchanges of their linguistic substance.

Every utterance signals presence in the sense of participation, but not all communications are usefully viewed as phatic or presence casting. Presence casting, as I propose the term, pertains to technologically-mediated communication, Ham radio and telephony included, but my focus is networked social media.

I don’t see John’s comment as presence casting but as interlocution that, along with Erin’s and Arianne’s, gives the confirming satisfaction of communication received and returned. I think that’s why so many comments begin with expressions of thanks.

Erin, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “form not content,” though it certainly reads that way from a “culture of meaning” POV. Arianne’s point about divided presence and attention in the classroom brings up a host of timely challenges for “cross-cultural” understanding of these social phenomena.

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JLM: Today we’re going to talk about your study, ‘Showa Hit-Frequency Songs’. Before we get into the content, could we talk a bit about the word-counting method you used?

SK: Every year we use the same method to analyse the New Year’s editions of newspapers and magazines. We look at the words in their headlines, from which we learn what has happened and what directions the world is moving in. Recently, though, we haven’t been using word counts in big studies focused on special themes.
Before we started, a few university professors had done similar projects, but they always counted small sets of words by hand. When people count by hand a lot of subjective bias gets into the process. It was shortly before we did ‘Showa High-Frequency Songs’ that computer software that could do word counts appeared, in a program called ‘Happiness’. We decided to try it out. There are lots of programs that do this now, but then it was revolutionary.
Our method is to count everything, to exclude subjective bias. Only after everything has been counted do we look at the results. Counting first and then thinking about the results is much better than thinking first and then counting.
Suppose you count all the words in someone’s conversation. If a certain woman’s name appears many times, you can infer that there is a strong interest there, even if the person who is speaking is unaware of the fact. That’s what makes counting so interesting. It’s a kind of depth psychology. When we look at what people have written, we can see things that the writer wasn’t conscious of saying. We can see, era by era, how people’s unconscious feelings have changed.

JLM: Why, then, haven’t you done any big thematic studies since 1990?

SK: I’ve thought of doing a similar study [of song lyrics] for the Heisei era, but it wouldn’t be interesting until enough time had passed. Now that it’s been almost ten years . . . . But really, there isn’t any reason. I just stopped for a while.

JLM: You haven’t done another study, but how do you see what’s been happening through your own eyes? How has Japanese music changed in the last nine years?

SK: Music? What we analysed was lyrics. Now the number of totally meaningless words has increased. Melody and rhythm have become more important than the words. I said that I had just stopped for a while, but I wonder how meaningful counting words would be now. Lyrics no longer have the power they used to. Perhaps Japanese who listen to music have changed as well. Physical sensation (kankaku) has become more important. Words carry emotion but they are also intellectual . . . today’s songs have become . . . perhaps the right thing to say is more directly felt. People listen to music for the feeling alone. If we had a way to count them, elements of melody and rhythm would now be more important.

JLM: Is that what Sekizawa calls resonance (kyôshin)?

SK: No. That involves shared feeling (kyôkan). Have you noticed that songs are becoming higher-pitched? It would be interesting to count the notes in songs. Every year they seem to be higher. Voices are becoming more falsetto, more forced. It could be the effect of the spread of karaoke. Counting is most interesting when something seems to be changing. If it doesn’t show you what’s going on in people’s hearts, it’s not all that stimulating.