Open source, collectivism, and Japanese society

This paper is about collectivism in the Network Society. Many
researches about the Network Society evaluate collectivism, citing Japanese
culture and Hacker culture as good models of such collectivism. However, some
researchers, such as K. Abe in his analysis of “Seken,” criticize Japanese
collectivism. Abe’s study pointed out the negative effect of Japanese collectivism
on scientific progress. This paper will criticize Abe’s study and offer a new model
for evaluating collectivism, which has previously been evaluated in earlier studies
about the Network Society. First this paper introduces the previous studies and
considers a model of communication in the Network Society. Then this paper
considers the results of a survey of Japanese engineers in order to test the validity
and shortcomings of this model.