Cyberspace as Socio-psychological Space : Cross-Cultural Comparison among the Japanese, Koreans and Finns

抄録

Even though IT is the same as technology, substantial socio-cultural differences exist in the way IT is interwoven into socio-cultural practices and socio-psychological configuration. This article has two objectives. For one thing, I would like to make a critical scrutiny of the way information society is conceptualized and argued. Four problems associated with the conceptualization of information society are articulated and discussed. That is (1) its historical contextualization, (2) its "disruptiveness", (3) its uniformity hypothesis, and (4) its discursive structure of rosy expectations and gloomy apprehensions. I contend that these problems stem from the lack of in depth empirical studies among information society studies which pay sufficient attention to social and cultural diversity and people's practice. Therefore, I would like to do a comparative study of internet use in Japan, Finland and Korea, based on the so-called JFK survey study, so that I can decipher substantial differences across different societies in terms of the kind of IT equipment and service that is diffused, how it is used, socio-psychological attitudes toward cyberspace and so on, which is the other objective of this article. Putting them together, I propose that "information society" be taken not in its singular form, but in its plural form, "information societies" and that we advance cross-cultural research in information society studies and develop a conceptual framework to analyze and describe comparative differences of different information societies.