While the previous section examined how offline third spaces facilitated how youth interacted with one another under the common interest of anime and manga popular culture, this section will discuss how virtual third spaces, or fourth spaces, provided by anime blogs and imageboards reinforce previous social possibilities found in the offline third spaces, and also generate new interactions among fans of the community.

The relation between Japan’s contemporary technology use and its traditional culture is complex: while some advocates that these technologies have caused Japanese youth to slowly abandon their culture’s traditions, others claim that technologies such as the Internet and cell phones have are slowly becoming a part of Japanese culture. The economic bubble collapse in the 1990s, in particular, has catalyzed youth’s involvement in social media technologies in a variety of ways. In “Individualization,” McVeigh describes three aspects of how cell phone use in Japan has facilitated a means for youth to affirm their identities and resist social control. This personal individualization, as he terms it, allows individuals to define themselves through fashion, expression, and also provides one’s own space, away from the vicissitudes of work and home. Fundamentally, the Internet share these features that the social networks of cell phone have constructed, though the use of blogs and image boards, and have become more accessible for young people to define their identity for both themselves, and in the context of their larger society.

Among other forms of online social media, blogs have become one of the most widely-used mediums of the anime subculture community. While not limited to a particular age group, blogs have become closely linked to youth activity, as younger generations have been accessing these alternative online sources for information and entertainment. For example, Tumblr, one of the more popular blogging site in both the East and West, allows users to create posts with text, photos, audio, and video, to share content to other users who follow their blog. Various communities across the entertainment spectrum have developed on the site, and users are able to converse with one another to discuss their favorite characters, shows, and entertainment industries overall. Conversations are openly displayed for the global internet community to view, and even social hierarchies can form in which the opinions from users who have been engaged to more content, simply from being online, are taken more seriously then remarks for less exposed users.


Blogs allow users to establish their own individualized identity through the blog they design and the content they post, while simultaneously allowing them to participate in new collectivities through the common interests they share. However, image boards differentiate themselves the user-based model of blogs mainly through anonymity and non-permanent images. Rather than recognizing itself as an established collectivity akin to the fan communities on Tumblr, which emphasize user identification and archival cataloging of data, the social interactions on image boards are rendered impersonal and temporary; over time, not only is the credibility of posted content lost, but the post itself will be deleted. Image boards have become a popular fourth space in which individuals can freely interact with one another around a common interest without fear of taking responsibility for any content they post.



The two most well-known image boards, the Japanese Futaba Channel and the English-language 4chan, were originally created as forums for anime-related content and other underground subcultures (such as building model figurines and skateboarding). While these two image boards followed social norms that could be identified as either Japanese (Futaba) or more Western (4chan), users from both boards shared similar online behaviors that were facilitated by the anonymity and ephemeral nature of the forum design. A 2011 study by Bernstein et al. on the large online community of 4chan's most notorious discussion board, /b/, explains how anonymity allows users to share intimate details in open conversations without any backlash, and also provides a safe space for experimentation in user-generated content. Forum threads that are popular with more replies are pushed to the top of the page, while those without any responses fall to the later pages, and then deleted; this continuous removal of underpopulated threads ensures that only the most talk-about topics stay relevant on the site, and require constant user participation to keep their discussions alive.

The glocalization and cultural hybridity of anime culture is essential in the survivability of the anime communities on both mediums of blogs and image boards. For example, dedicated blogs and image board forum threads take manga directly scanned by an overseas user who personally obtained a copy of the product, translate the contents (taking care to localize or explain certain cultural aspects that may have no easily translatable counterpart in the other language), and post a clean image of the manga scans for the rest of the global community to see. The online cultures developed in both blog communities and image board collectives incorporate aspects from both Eastern and Western social cultures (in the case of image boards, there are even threads in which users from Futaba Channel and 4chan's /a/nime board go to each other's respective sites and "bring something back" to post), and form a new cultural identity that is distinct from the originals.

References

1. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. "4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community." ICWSM. 2011.
2. McVeigh, Brian J. "Individualization, Individuality, Interiority, and the Internet." Japanese Cybercultures. By Nanette Gottlieb and Mark J. McLelland. London: Routledge, 2003. 19-33. Print.