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2017 | Book

Public Sphere and Social Capital in the Age of Intermediality: Approach from Computational Social Science Read chapter Read first chapter

Reconstruction of the Public Sphere in the Socially Mediated Age

Editors: Kaoru Endo, Prof. Satoshi Kurihara, Takashi Kamihigashi, Fujio Toriumi

Publisher: Springer Singapore

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

The aim of this book is to establish a basis for resolving the various issues facing modern society by exploring the field of Computational Social Science, which fuses the social and natural sciences. Today, society is threatened by problems concerning the environment, population growth, hunger and epidemics, all of which could lead to the extinction of humankind. However, attempting to resolve these issues is extremely difficult, because of the complex, intertwined factors involved, and because these issues are not just matters related to nature and the environment but also to society.

In this book, we investigate this aporia of the social sciences with the help of big data (which has gained considerable attention in recent years) and techniques such as agent-based simulation. Our aim is to resolve the complex system problems characteristic of the present age. In this regard, the book focuses on specific issues such as the reconstruction of public character in our social-media-saturated modern lifestyle, the current state of social capital, and the resultant social changes.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Public Sphere and Social Capital in the Age of Intermediality: Approach from Computational Social Science
Abstract
The development of modern rationality brought about a shift from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft,; the overcoming of natural phenomena by science and technology as well as the expansion of human capacity have become the basic requirement for society’s survival. However, the increase in uncertainty as a result of this development has heralded a risk society. Dealing with the risk society is one of the most urgent challenges of contemporary society. We introduce new effective methodologies collectively called computational social science, therefore.
Kaoru Endo

Theory

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. What Is Public Opinion? In the Age of Comlexedly-Mediated Democracy and Scandal Politics
Abstract
In the complexedly-mediated society, the public opinion which is the foundation of democracy should be considered not as a static norm but as a dynamic recursive self-creation process. From this point of view, this paper will analyze the series of scandals relating to the Masuzoe, the former Tokyo Governor, problem, and clarify the dynamic characteristics of the public opinion in the complexedly-mediated society.
Kaoru Endo
Chapter 3. Does Agent-based Modeling Flourish in Sociology? Mind the Gap between Social Theory and Agent-based Models
Abstract
I propose a new theoretical framework to fill the gap between social theory and agent-based models. Agent-based models have been popular in sociology because both of them assume that interactions of actors are the key to understanding and explaining social phenomena. However, there is a gap between social theory and agent-based models. Social theory emphasizes the importance of reflexivity and meaning in sociological study because actors reflect their goals and try to discover a new goal as in the case of Protestants in Max Weber’s work. They discovered the concept of vocation (Beruf in German) and added new meanings to their occupations. Then success in their occupational life became their goal. By contrast, agent-based models have not seriously considered them. This has led agent-based models to a niche in sociology. Thus for agent-based modeling to flourish in sociology, agent-based modelers need to incorporate reflexivity and meaning in their models. To do that, two mechanisms should be analyzed: a mechanism of the move between backward-looking rationality, forward-looking rationality, and reflexivity and a mechanism in which agents discover a new goal. I apply a meta rational theory (Sato 2016) to the first mechanism and show how actors move among the three components. Then, to explore the second mechanism, I assume that agents have limited cognitive capacity and propose a dynamic process in which agents discover a new goal. My new theoretical framework will make agent-based modeling more powerful in sociological study and, therefore, more attractive to sociologists.
Yoshimichi Sato
Chapter 4. Does the Internet Make People Selfish? Effects of the Internet on Citizens’ Political Attitudes
Abstract
I examined differences in opinions between an interview survey and an online survey. In sum, the results of my analysis clarified that opinions in interview surveys tend to be more prosocial compared to opinions in online surveys. Discrepancy and confrontation between opinions in face-to-face and online communication will bring about some problems in our society. Then, we need to understand that discrepancy and confrontation do not occur between different people, but among different frameworks of communication.
Naoki Sudo

Empirical Investigation

Frontmatter
Chapter 5. Social Capital on Social Media
Abstract
Social capital is critical during disasters. Many results have shown from various sociological researches that social media are effective tools to share information about victims, rescue attempts, and so on In such cases, we must clarify how social capital appears on social media. In this research, we collected the following personal data from 1500 Twitter users by crowdsourcing questionnaires: personal data, bonding social capital at Twitter, bridging social capita, and its behavioral features. We found that bonding social capital and bridging social capital can be explained by Twitter data. First, bonding social capital can be explained by the rate of replies among all tweets. Second, bridging social capital can be explained by rate of retweets among all tweets. Finally, we analyzed the effect of social capital on social media during disasters using data from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake in Japan. Analysis revealed that when bonding social capital is large, tweets related to disaster information are likely to get replies, and the probability of a reply to tweets related to disasters is higher than a general tweet.
Fujio Toriumi, Yuka Kamiko
Chapter 6. An Examination of a Novel Information Diffusion Model for Social Media
Abstract
Nowadays, users of Twitter, one of famous social media have rapidly increased in number, and many people have been exchanging in- formation by Twitter. When the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, people were able to obtain information from social media. Though Twitter played an important role, one problem was especially pointed out: false rumor diffusion. In this study, we propose two novel information diffusion models for elucidating the diffusion mechanism of information. One based on the SIR model which is a famous mathematics model, and the other base on word-of-mouth propagation.
Keisuke Ikeda, Satoshi Kurihara
Chapter 7. What Are Practical User Attributes in the Social Media Era?: Proposal for User Attribute Extraction from Their Social Capital
Abstract
Traditionally, typical demographics, such as gender, sex, generation, and occupation, are utilized as user attributes in sociology, marketing, and more. These user attributes had been effective since before the time of social media because those who have the same demographics communicate each other. However, many people currently use social media, and it has become easy for those who have the same interests, thoughts, or hobbies to communicate with each other. Therefore, there seems to be a need for new user attributes based on their communication styles on social media. In this chapter, we try to extract new user attributes from behaviors and social graphs of social media users and validate if those attributes are effective in the analysis for marketing.
Takeshi Sakaki
Chapter 8. Measuring Social Change Using Text Data: A Simple Distributional Approach
Abstract
This paper proposes a simple approach to measuring social change using text data. The approach is based on the idea that any significant change in a society should affect the distribution of the words used in the society. Essentially we use the total variation distance between the distributions of words in adjacent months as a measure of social change during the latter month. Basedł on text data from the Nikkei Newspaper from 1989 to 2015, the largest social change observed in Japan during this period took place in March 2011, the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Takashi Kamihigashi, Kazuhiro Seki, Masahiko Shibamoto
Chapter 9. Value Co-creative Manufacturing Methodology with IoT-Based Smart Factory for Mass Customisation
Abstract
The future of productivity and growth in a highly customized production environment has received much attention by practitioners. This paper presents an innovative methodology of value co-creative manufacturing with Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart factories for mass customized rubber products in a real-time scenario. To implement the proposed system design, a three-layered business oriented model is developed to offer maximum value co-creation for 3D printing technology development by integrating cloud computing and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) related to computational social science in customized manufacturing and product design. A Japanese case application is presented to demonstrate its usefulness and flexibility for the proposed system design including a computational social scientific approach.
Toshiya Kaihara, Daisuke Kokuryo, Shota Suginouchi, Swee Kuik
Chapter 10. Has the 3.11 Disaster Brought About Conservatism in Japan?
Abstract
This study uses survey data to examine empirically the effect of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 on attitudes towards politics. Drawing upon Terror Management Theory, we hypothesize that the earthquake triggered a fear of death in people, thus tilting their attitudes more conservative. Terror Management Theory postulates that exposure to a fear of death activates a psychological self-defense mechanism in people, who try to escape this fear by, for example, excessively embracing culture and building up their own egos. This article examines whether the fear of death triggered by the earthquake caused people in the disaster areas to become more conservative through an excessive embrace of political culture. To test this hypothesis, we rely on the Japanese Election Study IV, which provides panel data derived before and after the earthquake. Using this data, we empirically analyze changes in values, liberal–conservative ideology, materialism, and patriotism.
Masaki Hata, Jaehyun Song, Yutaka Shinada
Metadata
Title
Reconstruction of the Public Sphere in the Socially Mediated Age
Editors
Kaoru Endo
Prof. Satoshi Kurihara
Takashi Kamihigashi
Fujio Toriumi
Copyright Year
2017
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Electronic ISBN
978-981-10-6138-7
Print ISBN
978-981-10-6137-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6138-7

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