世論 What Japan Thinks

This rather buzzword-overloaded title refers to the results of a survey at the start of this month by goo Research, published by japan.internet.com, on spreading memes, or baton touching, to use the Japanese-English terminology; baton is the meme, touching is the spreading of it. 1,092 members of their monitor pool successfully completed an internet-based private poll; 56.8% of the sample was female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 29.4% in their forties,

Here the meme is the creation and spreading of a set of questions through the blogosphere (uggh, buzzword overload!); you get tagged by someone, answer a set of questions on a theme in a post to your blog, ending by selecting five more victims to take their turn in answering, as in this, the first English example I could find through Google, or this, a Japanese blog dedicated to passing the baton. “Baton touch” is, as indicated, yet another Japanese-English phrase, just in case you are confused by it, where we would probably use “baton pass” instead in English. Apparently if you pop onto mixi and search for バトン, baton, you can find no end of them to join in with.

Note that apparently this baton passing is also being used for PR campaigns, and for CGM, Consumer Generated Media, but as to what form this takes, I am yet to learn.

Q1: Do you know about “baton touching”, passing a public questionnaire around blogs, SNS, etc? (Sample size=1,092)

Yes (to SQ1)	34.0%
No	68.0%

Q1SQ1: Have you ever been passed the baton? (Sample size=371)

Yes (to SQ2, SQ3)	53.1%
No	46.9%

Q1SQ2: Have you ever answered a “baton” that has been passed around? (Sample size=197)

Have answered	83.2%
Haven’t answered	16.8%

Combining the previous three results together for the whole sample, we get

Q1+Q1SQ1+Q1SQ2: Have you ever answered a “baton” that has been passed around? (Sample size=1,092)

Have answered	15.0%
Haven’t answered	3.0%
Never been passed a baton	15.9%
Don’t know what a baton is	66.0%

Q1SQ3: What do you think about “baton touching”? (Sample size=197)

Enjoyable	21.3%
Unpleasant	5.6%
Depending on theme, either enjoyable or unpleasant	64.5%
Other	8.6%