Abstract
Today, more than 90% of Japan’s citizens are Internet users; even rural residents can now access it with the same ease as city dwellers. As a result of rising number of users, more rural residents are becoming incr easingly affected by the Internet. On one hand, the Internet presents them with an enhanced opportunities for daily communication; on the other hand, concurrently, there are disadvantages: we assume, for example, that Internet users in rural areas lose interest in their own regional communities as they spend more time on the Internet. In this study, we focus on the “sense of region” among Internet users who live in hilly and mountainous areas. As a result of our analysis, we found that Internet users—especially users of social networking sites, including Twitter—tend to have a lower interest in their own regions, as compared to those who do not use the Internet for such purposes. Following this result, it is important to determine the ways of Internet usage that will deliver positive effects to these regions, before the negative influence can proliferate.
