A Consideration of Social Relationships and Social Support in a Virtual Society

Abstract

Anonymous online communications more easy to self-disclosure than offline communications. However, Japanese young people's online social relationships tend to include offline social relationships. Therefore, it is important to complement offline social relationships by communication tools which have few offline relationships. For this complementing, we discuss online social support in an avatar chat service "Pigg Party." We marshal user-interview results of application developers of this service from a viewpoint of online social support.