In the city, they go “pit pit pit”: Digital media’s affordances and imagined (dis)connections in a rural Japanese community

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This project explores how lower class individuals living in a small rural Japanese community employ digital media in their daily lives and how this use of technology shapes their sense of self. Drawing from ethnographic research, it considers the locally specific ways in which individuals have embraced digital technology and how the technology’s “imagined affordances” intersect with their cultural, regional, and class identities, both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. It argues that despite community members’ active use of digital technology, numerous barriers (both imagined and actual) continue to limit their ability to fully engage in digital culture and discusses how these barriers lead to a sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection from both urban contexts and an imagined global community. It concludes that more carefully situated local accounts of digital praxis are a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world.