But the future may not be so bright for Mixi. After having found itself in hot water a few months ago for a change in its terms of use agreement, it now faces a new competitor, with Facebook having been localized by volunteers into Japanese. Mixi and Facebook are both social networking services, but they are very different in the way that their users handle identity: whereas the Mixi mode is obfuscation (fake photos, fake registered names, etc.), in Facebook users generally use their real identity.
Apparently Facebook is going to fully launch their service in Japan. I heard that they are heavily promoting [the use of] real names. Putting aside whether this will actually happen or not, I think it is of course a good thing for there to be SNS that use real names. As a means of communication at the level of work, neighborhood associations, family associations, region and interests, one that makes clear [a person's] identity just as is in everyday life, SNS are a useful tool.
Of course in these SNS, there is a demand for styles [of communication] such as telling lies, hiding secrets, and maintaining a public stance, various defensive measures of the kind that we all use in real life. It's impossible to put absolute trust in a stranger, and there are human relationships that [people] do not want other friends of theirs to know about.
SNS with the functionality to properly protect this kind of [information] become society's infrastructure in the true sense of the term, like telephone and the postal service. Or to put it conversely, communication tools that rely on “conscience” are not capable of acting as this infrastructure. It is only once ill intentions are taken into account that [these tools] begin to function as an infrastructure.
In the case of mixi, it has recently finally become possible to group your friends and section your diary into a part that can be made public, but I have the feeling that people have already been seduced too much by the illusion of “conscience”, and that this move may be too late. At just the point in time when diary disclosure had become a social problem, mixi was not able to graduate from [a sense of] “conscience”, and for this reason the culture of real names in mixi broke completely. They were far too naive and defenseless against ill intentions. Even though warnings had previously been issued, believers in the mixi religion, who like a cult [said things like] “do you question people's conscience?” and “we have faith in people's conscience”, fanatically denied the warnings altogether.
Mechag then goes on to argue that if real names are endorsed, the system should not be set “open to everybody” by default. The entry continues:
In the real world, nobody shows the list of all their associations so that everybody can see them. That's like an elementary school name tag. Actually nowadays even in elementary schools there are those who argue that it is dangerous to attach a name tag with the students name and name of the school on it.
In activities as well, nobody writes down things like their intentions, and their own thoughts and beliefs, in a place where it is not even clear who will see them. It is of course absurd that [a person] would lay bear their worries to even their own friends, let alone to perfect strangers. These are the kinds of things that people only publicize to a very limited intimate [group] of close friends and family.
SNS that demand responsibility through the use of real names state these kinds of points, and do not rely on the illusion of good intentions and conscience. The ultimate communication tool, I think, is a tool that is designed with attention focused on the issue of “how much is the communication restricted”.
It is of course good that there are anonymous SNS. I suppose that there must be many aspects of human beings that cannot be dealt with in an SNS that uses real names [to assure] responsibility in the true sense outlined above. There are many people who glorify communication based on “real names”, but doing that I think is just harboring an illusion about real names. It's just like young girls who yearn for love even though they have no experience of love or marriage.
The absurd desire to “confess one's real intention to a complete stranger” is in some sense a desire for destruction — this is the way human beings think. The negative aspects of the kind of human beings who want to commit suicide, who want to commit crimes, cannot be denied. Light and dark, good and bad, theory and emotion, charity and self-interest, networks must ultimately become tools to act as a receptacle for all human thoughts and actions. If expression using real names is not socially protected in a proper way, then it doesn't matter how much one has appealed, [the popularity] of real names will not spread.
The main character in the manga “Android Kikaider” by Ishinomori Shotaro, Jiro, was a robot with an incomplete conscience circuit (Gemini), and as a result of this incompleteness he was full of worries and anguish. At the end of a long battle, Jiro ended up not with the perfect conscience circuit, but with an evil mind (obedience circuit). Through a conflict between the two circuits of justice and evil, he acquires not only kindness, but also strength, declaring as he leaves that: “With this, I have become the same as a human.”
The current social condition resembles Jiro wandering in search of a perfect conscience circuit. Such a thing is not obtainable, and even if it were, I doubt that it would make [a person] happy. Because it would only be able to support one half of the human heart.
Thanks to Taku Nakajima for the suggestion to translate this blog post.