世論 What Japan Thinks

Well, these figures from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com were surprising to me at least, in this the third regular look at text communication.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 7th of November 2013 1,079 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private mobile phone and smartphone-based questionnaire. 57.7% of the sample were female (note, this figure is higher than usual due to this being a mobile survey verses the computer-based surveys that bias towards men), 2.3% were in their teens, 20.9% in their twenties, 35.2% in their thirties, 29.6% in their forties, and 12.0% aged fifty or older.
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japan.internet.com reported on a recent survey by goo Research looking at electronic text-based communication, the second time such a survey has been performed; the first survey was also presented on this blog in May.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 9th of August 2013 exactly 1,000 mobile phone- (including smartphone-) using members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private mobile phone internet-based questionnaire. 56.8% of the sample were female, 1.4% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 36.5% in their thirties, 26.5% in their forties, and 15.2% aged fifty or older.

I did say in the last report that I found the SMS figure hard to believe, but other people argued that it was realistic, although I can’t say I was terribly convinced.

Note that the implication of this survey is for private messaging, not public postings to SNS or comment threads.
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A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into text-based communication revealed carrier email ruled for mobile users, but SMS was also unexpectedly popular.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 10th of May 2013 1,073 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a mobile phone (including smartphone) based survey. 54.1% of the sample were female, 2.1% in their teens, 18.6% in their twenties, 38.3% in their thirties, 27.8% in their forties, and 13.1% aged fifty or older.

Quite frankly, I find the mobile carrier SMS figure very difficult to believe, especially as there is no such thing as free texts plans, and they cost 3.5 yen each on docomo at least, and all phones come with carrier email that is usually free and supports much longer messages than SMS. Perhaps many people think that sending an email to another mobile user is SMS? However, talking to a friend, he suggested that emoji on the iPhone are much easier to use in SMS than in email, and also LINE (pictured above) encourages people to use phone numbers, not email addresses.

I use pretty much everything listed here, except for SMS and SNS. I use Google Hangouts for social chat, which I suppose counts as a voice call service, especially now it has become a standalone app rather than the old Messenger that was grafted on to Google Plus.
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