During the first two decades in the 21st century, it is clear that for the
mass media, which played a major social role in the last century, its role has
relatively been diminished, and the Internet has penetrated deeply into
Japanese society.
What are the implications for society of this change from an era in which
mass media exerts a great influential power to shape society at large to an
era in which the Internet also plays a major role? If we contrast the mass
media and the Internet, the characteristics of the Internet are said to be
“diversification,”“polarization,” “filtering,” and “micro-targeting” which drives
its growth as an advertising medium. In the political dimension, these
characteristics have attracted strong social and academic interest, as they are
supposed to produce the phenomenon of “social polarization” and “echo
chambers.”
In this paper, I would argue that the technological determinism that “the
Internet intensifies social polarization” is false. I propose to consider the
relative reduction of the role of the mass media and the expansion of the
Internet media not as the “from the masses to the net” phenomenon but as
the “formation of a polymedia society.” My study, after specifying an “echo-
chamber scale” using social survey data, suggests that the higher the media
diversity, the lower the echo-chamber degree. That is, active use of the
polymedia environment is important to reduce the echo-chamber degree.
From this perspective, the concern is that Japanese society has a high echo-
chamber level compared internationally.
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