Archiving local memories online developed by the affected local governments used to be a popular tool to pass down the lessons after the Great East Earthquake, however these systems have been pointed out some several issues, such as dramatically reduced number of accessing. In addition, many of the archived stories were too much focused on the listens “how to evacuate” that the precious local pluralistic stories were left out. From the previous research, Sasaki (2016) designed “collaborative” place to generate pluralistic stories of the evacuees from the town of Namie due to the TEPCO's Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power plant. Sasaki's paper concluded that the complex interaction within the collaborative place helped generate various stories, yet it is unclear why the stories have generated. Therefore, the paper analyzes and clarifies the mechanism of its generativity process by using E.Goffman's perspective on dramaturgy which includes interaction ritual of role distance. As a result, the collaborative place holds multiple layered audiences and meets various roles freely by having intimate relationship between the performer and audiences, to generate pluralistic stories which could keep a distance from the media representation of a “typical”evacuees.

Telecommunications carriers in Japan have been obligated to promote filtering use and have been empowered as a policy to ensure youths' online safety. However, the ratio of filtering use has decreased in recent years. To address this situation, awareness education has been implemented as a national policy. This study analyzed the efficiency of educational methods to promote filtering use. According to the results, educational experiences increased in 2013 compared with that in 2009, although these experiences could not promote filtering use in all school levels. From this result, it is thought that it is necessary to improve current awareness education policies in order to disseminate the use of filtering. Therefore, based on the analysis result, this paper proposed the following three measures. 1) Promoting awareness education more than the current level. 2) As an improvement of the timing of providing awareness education, providing awareness education before young people purchase a mobile phone. 3) As a measure against the problem of uniformity of filtering, increasing the awareness of customization function of filtering according to the developmental stage to young people and parents.

In this article, “a citizen digital archive activity” is defined as a collective practice in which local residents work on preserving and sharing local records and memories with digital technologies to recover the town as their territory. Eleven activities in various areas of Japan were analyzed with data from interviews with the members and, in some cases, participatory observations. Details of each activity, such as the history, main activities, achievements, and information technologies of the group were analyzed. There were considerable differences among activities in their histories, the characteristics of the group members, types of content they collected, and the ways they shared them with others. Using socio-technical network analysis, it was found that similar problems are handled in different ways but they still obtain equivalent results. Common factors in the successful maintenance of the activities involved strategic networking between human and non-human actors. Sometimes a technical actor that looked trivial played as important a role as a human actor in the network in facilitating or impeding the activity. We need to connect various resources formerly dispatched in local communities in making and maintaining citizen digital archives. In this sense the archives should hold a tight arrangement of human and non-human actors. In addition, the study showed that we need not only make a static network arrangement, but need to reshape it constantly as a fluid collective to maintain the activity “in action”.

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, the importance of social media as a tool for distributing information has increased in the event of large-scale disasters. However, information overload and false rumors have challenged the effective use of social media. To address the issue, this research considers the applicability of information triage, which aims to sort out higher-priority information under time pressure, to social media. Information on social media platforms was collected and analyzed, while qualitative surveys on the impacts that social media had at the time of the Kumamoto Earthquake were carried out with media organizations and fire departments. Results showed that it is difficult to find rescue information on social media. Findings also showed that, although information triage works among fire departments during normal periods, it was dysfunctional at the time of the earthquake due to the vast quantities of reports received, including information via social media. This study showed that the issue of information overload and false rumors could be addressed by sorting out information on social media in collaboration with fire departments, which enables information triage to function. This research suggests that, in order to allow social media to function effectively as a means of information distribution in the event of large-scale disasters, it is important not only to study information on social media but also to study activities in disaster-hit areas and consider ways to collaborate with people involved in such activities. The findings can also be useful in not only relief efforts, but also in relaying information on the extent of damage and extent of aid delivery, through social media.