Daniel Johnson’s Textual Cacophony: Online Video and Anonymity in Japan is a penetrating and wide-reaching study of the larger sociocultural forces behind how users form community through online chat forums and video-hosting platforms popular in Japan. Through a close reading of users’ sociality on two specific websites, Johnson develops an ambitious and cogent methodological approach to the performativity, semantics, and temporality of how text and video shape internet users’ sociality. Looking at these online interactions and their attendant forms of text production and viewership, Johnson concludes that online sociality does not offer an alternative to neoliberalism’s anomie or disparities.

Drawing on Japanese criticism, fan studies, folkloristics, and philosophy alongside Anglophone scholarship from Japanese studies to performance theory, Textual Cacophony’s multidisciplinary approach breaks new ground with its focus on aggregate, anonymous, and asynchronous forms of internet-mediated sociality. Johnson focuses on two websites – the now-defunct chat forum, 2channel, and the video-hosting platform, Niconico – that both feature anonymous commenting and a degree of impermanence to users’ comments. In the case of 2channel, once a forum “thread” reaches 1000 comments, it automatically closes. Niconico, on the other hand, displays users’ comments entered into the chat as superimposed on the video itself – but only a certain number of the most recent comments.

In Textual Cacophony, Johnson situates the technologically mediated sociality of both 2channel and Niconico as providing platforms where “…users learn to navigate such gaps and fissures in time and develop ways of watching, playing, and communicating around the inherent latency and structured delays in online media” (132). Johnson brings readers through how the anonymous user identities, asynchronous temporality, and the impermanence of text on these websites lead to unique forms of text production and viewership.

Suturing together the elaborate theorization and intricate portraits of online sociality and text in Textual Cacophony are two events that echo and illustrate the key arguments and practices at hand. Johnson opens and closes Textual Cacophony with two different, equally instructive iterations of Japanese broadcaster Fuji TV’s annual United States of Odaiba event. This event showcases Fuji TV’s in-house programming and talents yearly through a festive open house. In 2011, the event drew protestors following an infamous set of comments by media personality Takaoka Sōsuke about perceived pro-Korean bias at Fuji TV in July of 2011.

In his introduction to Textual Cacophony, Johnson focuses on how the protest was streamed live to sites such as Niconico and Ustream, representing an intersection between internet culture and “real-world identities and ideologies” (3). However, the protest is notable for how the online viewers, seemingly sharing a political stance with the protestors, began to mock them when the throngs of festival-goers engulfed the protesters. The online derision of the protestors highlighted how the crowds were rendering the protestors’ presence rather inconspicuous.

In the postscript to Textual Cacophony, Johnson turns to the United States of Odaiba event one year later, where the streaming service Niconico had a booth promising real-time interactions between its users and the festival-goers. In the postscript, Johnson focuses on a specific interaction where the online users expended particularly strenuous efforts to create an image of sushi via their comments in the chat feed – only to have the intended audience of a man and his two children already move on to the next booth before seeing the image. This event, Johnson observes, drives home points found in the United States of Odaiba a year earlier: out-of-joint online and offline socialities, unique online forms of script and language use, and the unique nature of aggregate online identities.

Within both live-streamed happenings at the United States of Odaiba and throughout Textual Cacophony, Johnson trains his analytic focus on a lag between “actual-world” events and online discourse about them, discrete relationships between online sociality and actual-world events and identities, and both aggregate and anonymous identities. The purpose of Johnson’s book is not limited to tracing the specific socialities generated by online platforms in twenty-first-century Japan. Rather, Textual Cacophony focuses on how forms of communication shaped by aggregate identity, anonymity, and asynchronous temporality enable new forms of belonging in late capitalism. At the same time, Johnson is acutely concerned with how unique, “deviant script” in online spaces is not simply an impediment to recognizing individual users and their intended denotational linguistic messages. Still, how does such a script’s repetition unveil the stylistics of aggregate, anonymous identity?

Key to 2channel and Niconico’s specificity is the combination of anonymous users, asynchronous temporality, and impermanence of comments and text on these websites. That is, users do not have the same identity (handle or username) across different videos or message boards, users are not all using the website simultaneously, and comments are visible only for a certain period. Together, anonymity, asynchronicity, and impermanence lead to specific forms of text production that characterize these sites’ novelty, at least from the standpoint of linguistic analysis and film/performance studies.

With these websites, Johnson develops four interrelated components they share:

1. 1) How asynchronous experiences of time “…organize so much of the experience of online sociality” (29) and mediate users’ interactions;

2. 2) How certain “animated” forms of text are read not just semantico-referentially but “seen” in specific ways (59);

3. 3) Aesthetic and social dimensions of anonymity (42–44, 103, 114); and

4. 4) An impermanence that fosters distinct modes of accumulation and repetition, which co-construct anonymous identity (64, 76).

One distinguishing feature of these websites is how seeming orthographic errors – typos, different phonetic readings – are patterned and reproduced. Johnson positions these forms of text production as a key part of online sociality for 2channel and Niconico and demands an analysis that sees the production of text on these sites as doing more than just communicating on a semantico-referential level and thus meriting a reconceptualization of what sociality means in these virtual spaces. Specifically, he looks at how usages of various ideographs and words do not rely on their semantico-referential meaning but utilize them as visual cues to construct online sociality. He illustrates this point by meditating on Niconico’s “comment art” (47–50).

On Niconico, users’ messages in the chat feed are visually projected onto the original video; comment artists (shokunin in Niconico users’ parlance) produce spectacles that merge with the videos. Johnson contends that the blur between the original video and the comment art “renders the experience [of watching a video and reading comments] from one of reading and focused looking into one that is kinaesthetic: textual cacophony and a tangible sensation of movement and energy” (50).

Another distinguishing feature of the sort of text production that Johnson considers in Textual Cacophony is its impermanence. Whether 2channel or Niconico, the websites and script forms he analyzes are, to a certain degree, impermanent (64); as he explains, during its existence, 2channel forum threads would close after reaching a certain number of posts (29). Johnson thus presciently asks, “But what about the ways users develop practices of use around the ingrained ephemerality of the media they engage with?” (65). Rather than take the impermanence of these websites as a limit, Johnson understands the impermanence as a condition of possibility for “distinct cultures of use” (ibid). With the impermanence of the very media troubling an analysis that privileges a bounded, discrete object, Johnson argues for a performance studies-infused approach.

By focusing on performance rather than discrete texts, Textual Cacophony centers on how users mediate the enabling conditions of virtual sociality – anonymized, aggregated, and impermanent – through specific practices of interpretation and text production. At the heart of Textual Cacophony is Johnson’s grappling with how the “cacophony” of these websites’ barrage-style text is the ever-proliferating volume and scope of text. Looking at this vast swathe of anonymous, aggregate, and ephemeral text, Johnson argues users are producing text that undermines forms of engagement that prioritize denotational meaning and linearity. These technologically mediated modes of text production displace denotational meaning and linearity through the “obscurity” of authorship and blurring of linguistic registers (65).

This cacophony, Johnson explains, obfuscates how online social identities that emerge around specific forms of text production are, more often than not, ambiguously related to “actual-world” identities. Johnson characterizes both authorship and readership/viewership on a visually cacophonous website as beholden to “a dynamic of invisibility and spectacle” (8) as well as “pseudo-synchronicity” (9). Johnson explains that these websites’ lack of persistent user identity and, thus, reams of unattributed writing, as well as their “technologically produced liveness” (10) – not only in the computer-animated movement and projection of comments over videos but also in how the aggregate visual representation of asynchronous online activity – facilitates a form of collective belonging that goes beyond users’ physical distance and different temporalities.

Beyond a simple displacement of individual identity, Johnson uncovers that the specific registers for users’ communication on these sites are articulated by an interplay of individual users, the technological specificities of the websites, and the culture of users on that site. Johnson points to “the prioritization of things like style and repetition of familiar expressions in this type of media becomes central to how individual users navigate their own experience with that of the online, anonymous aggregated” (11).

Johnson forcefully argues that while these emergent aggregate identities may seem to commute the temporal differences between users or offer a feeling of coordination,

And so, textual cacophony is not just a matter of internet aesthetics but also an “analytic” (65–66). That is to say, Johnson investigates how the chaotic “liveness” produced by rapidly scrolling text or quickly advancing forum posts is not just a set of texts that obscure individuals’ identities or paper over their spatial and temporal differences but how the texts themselves necessitate a reconceptualization of both the media object and writing.

Pointing to how Niconico videos garner engagement and views not only because of the original video but also the user comments superimposed by the website, Johnson presciently writes that,

This sort of rapid-fire text superimposed on a video – text meant to be “seen” rather than read –leads Johnson to argue that ways of animating text have produced the videos as sites of performance. In a key passage, he explains,

Drawing on prior scholars of computer-generated images and text, Johnson proposes that users of Niconico are more than just reading the text for denotational meaning or having their viewing of a video thwarted by the cacophonous danmaku-style text rapidly scrolling across the screen. Still, each viewer engages in a culturally, historically, and technologically situated performance. Building on work in film and media studies, Johnson looks to 2channel and Niconico users as not simply deciphering texts primarily operating on a referential level but, instead, simultaneously “reading” and “seeing” (56–59). In other words, while the original video uploaded to Niconico remains the same, the text scrolling across it – and thus the varied registers simultaneously negotiated by users – is not. Johnson extends this notion of performance to contemplate how the “community” found through these websites is not a static group membership: “the ability to successfully read animated writing and read the experience of pseudo-simultaneity that we can find the mode of performance that constitutes the abstract concept of community on the site” (59).

In Textual Cacophony, Johnson argues that the fragmented understanding that users glean from the nonstandard orthography and textual play (e.g., using kanji with the same phonetic reading but different meanings) is not so much a deficit of or impediment to meaning (41) but a “performance” wherein the users’ engagement “animates” the text. This “animating,” Johnson explains, facilitates unique communities emergent around how the text is interpreted. Johnson here observes that not only is the individual’s role in producing text minimized by their anonymity on 2channel or Niconico, but their agency is mediated by how “the individual act of writing becomes diminished in favor of patterns of recognition and circulation in a wider field of repertoire” (66). That is, the technology enabling online sociality inherently privileges aggregation over individuality. The cacophony of anonymous voices seeming to speak at the time unveils agency as emergent in a “performance” rather than the identification of a user with a strip of text or their control over it. As Johnson explains, users’ agency is found emerging in “the sensation of an active body of users who cannot be identified individually yet still possess some semblance of identity through their association with the site interface and cultural norms” (30).

Simultaneously, he argues that the enjoyability of these chaotic, nonstandard script forms begets a reconsideration of nonstandard script and incomprehension of texts more generally (62–63). Focusing on the role of users’ engagement in assembling meaning through culturally, historically, and technologically mediated practices, Johnson situates the decentering of the original video and author as the grounds for identifying with an aggregate community.

Johnson thus stipulates that the performativity of these videos is limited to text production on these sites. Instead, the “form of animated writing seen on Niconico cannot be adequately grasped without paying attention to the techniques of reading, scanning, and looking that users of the site must engage with…” (59). Further explaining performance as applicable beyond writing, Johnson writes that “we can think of reading as a way of seeing, a way of translating or deciphering animated writing” (ibid).

The significance, he argues, is that the users play a key role in establishing a sense of community and temporality on these websites: absent the users, the stock of previously entered comments is not “animated” into a here-and-now experience of a video’s liveliness. Johnson explains that for a video to have this quality, comments and the original video file are not the only requisite. A specific person’s viewing experience renders a given video lively, as well as different, nonstandard orthography (e.g., alphabet letters or Chinese ideographs assembled into images) as evidence of a community of individuals online.

Johnson keenly observes that the forms of authorship, belonging, and readership/viewership on sites like 2channel and Niconico profoundly shape these sites’ technological limits and structures. Johnson argues that impermanence and temporality twist text production and cultures of use on both websites. In a prescient comment relevant to websites and online sociality far beyond those chronicled in Textual Cacophony, Johnson writes,

Johnson’s attention to how new forms of sociality are enabled by specific technological means solidifies into a critique of how online sociality converges with neoliberalism’s elevation, “…of the individual at the expense of a more socially committed way of being” (135–136). Textual Cacophony’s chapters cumulatively build toward this critique by outlining how the ways users on 2channel and Niconico negotiate the different temporalities of users, the impermanence of media, and – or “the ways social disconnection can be recovered as connection” (132) – are creative and novel but also obligate users’ labor and leave the “actual world” in place.

Indeed, Johnson’s examination of online sociality highlights that while the cacophony of rapidly advancing images and text on 2channel and Niconico seems to be a crowd speaking together simultaneously, the reality is more complicated. Drawing on Hamano Satoshi’s work, Johnson argues that the “pseudo-synchronicity” (28, 77) of how user comments appear on 2channel and Niconico belies how these websites’ visuality and their users’ style transmogrify the “actual differences in time between users” into something that is,

While online sociality appears to be “generating an alternative mode of rapport and belonging between users that appears to promise (but not necessarily fulfill) a resolution to the social and cultural gaps produced by the degradation of traditional social institutions in contemporary Japan” (4), Johnson ends up casting several key aspersions on technology’s promises. To wit, the introduction’s close reading of online anti-Korean sentiment percolates into an actual-world protest against broadcaster Fuji TV. Johnson poignantly observes that these aggregate, anonymous forms of online identification and community leave “traditional social hierarchies” (15) intact.

Corollary, Johnson repeatedly highlights that while online sociality offers new ways of connecting, 2channel and Niconico users’ orthographic strategies suggest a general “moving from individual representation or agency toward networked intersubjectivity…” (59). Pointing to the work of Azuma Hiroki and others examining technological mediation agency, Johnson presents that there is a “displacement of authorship into an interstitial negotiation between the user, the culture of the site they are engaging with, and the media form itself” (65). Johnson argues this is the case because while users have developed unique communities around specific forms of aggregate authorship and viewership, it is “a deindividualized mode of conduct centered on patterns of repetition that grant the appearance and feeling of coordination and spontaneity at the same time” (131). The decentering of individuals and privileging of an aggregate identity is thus more than a coincidence; it reflects the ideological forms of atomization on neoliberal Japan” (65).

So, in contrast to online sociality’s seeming novelty, Textual Cacophony consistently presents data that show how reliant online sociality is upon “actual-world experience and structures of meaning” (16). Instead of “a socially committed way of being” (136), online sociality offers atomization and the illusion of communication without the weight of social identities. Yet, whether it is the sorts of discriminatory rhetoric found in abundance on specific sites or the usage of language conforming to dominant language ideologies (14–15; 44–47), Textual Cacophony critically positions emergent online socialities’ possibilities within a broader social milieu that is shot through with class, ethnic, gender, and sexual hierarchies.

Textual Cacophony locates new forms of online sociality as emergent from, yet purporting to offer an alternative to, neoliberalism and its social impacts (135–136). As Johnson’s critical project comes into full view within the final chapters, readers learn more about 2channel and Niconico users’ extensive labor to catalog and reproduce the necessarily effervescent media produced by interactions on these sites (84–85). Whether through summary (matome) sites or “copy-pasta,” users’ labor reflects online society’s limits and enabling conditions (76).

On the one hand, users supply a vast pool of free labor to compensate for the necessary “lag” between users and the ephemeral nature of chat boards and video comments (76, 84–85, 89). On the other hand, Johnson turns to accounts of online fatigue, incomprehension, and the reverberation of real-world prejudices in online talk as a foil to notions that these websites’ aggregate identity and asynchronous temporality offer a viable alternative to offline sociality (105, 132). Johnson shows that these sites’ very technological structure – the enabling conditions of users’ interactions – has fomented neoliberalism’s fragmentation and atomization characteristics in Japan and beyond (17–18).

And so, while Johnson affirms the creativity and ingenuity of users, he compellingly shows that aggregate, anonymized online community is hardly unmoored from the stratified, anomic society in which it has emerged. Crucially, then, Textual Cacophony is both a brilliant extrapolation of the general theoretical importance of online sociality for the study of communication and language use writ large, as well as a critique of how uncritical stances toward technologically mediated social risk reifying existing social inequalities and hierarchies.

Textual Cacophony is a slim and vibrant volume that will offer much for those contemplating dimensions of contemporary Japanese society from diverse perspectives, whether working in the digital humanities or sociolinguistics. Textual Cacophony’s chapters will resonate differently with scholars working in various fields; those approaching language use in Japan and beyond will undoubtedly find Chapters One, Two, and Three a particularly lush bounty of theory and novel modes of language use. Scholars examining identity formation in contemporary Japan will likely be drawn to the book’s latter half. Textual Cacophony’s layered and sophisticated methodological and theoretical intervention would be well-suited for graduate-level coursework on extensive language use and seminars on contemporary Japan.