Wednesday, January 27, 2010

iPad's Day!!

Just wanted to write about what I've been looking forward to hear.
Today, Steave Jobs announced the new device iPad to the public.
From this morning, I've been excited by it. I read so many articles about it. I think I have a bit advantage on it because I'm able to read articles in English.
I first read articles in Japanese, but there were few and people were translating the resources in English to Japanese. Then, I switched to read English one.
Actually now, I'm watching a video of the Apple Event in this morning.

To tell the truth, I have a presentation of my class an hour later. However, my current priority now watching the video.... haha....
Oh boy, I'm a bad student....

Friday, January 8, 2010

Difference of the Internet between in English and in Japanese

As the title shows, I'm going to write about the difference of the Internet between in English and in Japanese.
Actually I've tried to express my ideas on this topic for a long time, but I was just so lazy that I didn't spend time for the post about this...
I don't say that I'm well informed about both of them, but I think I know the difference much more than other people. It is because I've used the internet in both languages.
I used only the English one the last year while I studied in US. Also, I saw many of my friends enjoying on the web and got to know how they use the internet.
I noticed there are big difference of how people use Internet at least in US and Japan.
Now, I first show my main idea about this.
I think the internet in English has become a part of people's life a lot more than in Japanese. I even think that the internet in Japanese has become in a wrong direction because of the anonymous character of its own. However, I think the internet in English has more where people have intellectual activities.

Take examples of SNS popular in US and Japan.
Facebook is definitely the most popular SNS in US and also in the worldwide. I don't need to explain facebook here.
In Japan, Mixi is the most popular. A few people use facebook. Although I have an account on Mixi, I don't use it much. On Mixi, they don't post their picture and show even their name (most people use their nick name.) So, it's really hard to find my friends in junior high or high school. I can't hit their name on the search box.
So, the society in Mixi is completely apart from the real life and people. I doubt this type of communication works. On facebook, we can keep friendship with whom we met only once but didn't change numbers. It passed a long time since I left US, but I can get to know how my friends are having life through facebook because the society there is just the copy of the real world.

As in the case of SNS, we have a big anonymous culture on the web in Japanese. Many people tend to hesitate showing their name. Therefore, people easily criticize other people on the web. Yahoo!Japan is the most popular search engine, but we can easily see such bad comments on many news pages without showing their name.
Many people in US now hunt for a job on sites such as LinkedIn. However, we are not so open to show ourselves on the web, and we don't have such a site. I think it will take time until we have such web site.

I'm very worried about the future of the internet in Japanese. People who don't use the net so much regard it as a bad culture. But I believe it's not. How we use the internet is the problem.
I started hunting for a job, and I will mainly apply for IT companies. But, my parents don't have a good image towards IT itself. I explained that IT industry is not totally for the end consumers. It has more field like B to B. They got a bit relieved when I finished explaining it.
I hope people eliminates bad images of IT itself when they heard the word someday soon.
And, I do hope the internet in Japanese goes to the right direction.