Joichi Ito Podcast: Technology and Engagement

by About Japan Editors
Getting children to engage in studying politics and goverment challenges even the best teachers in Japan and the United States.  However, in Japan recently, thousands of teenagers have spontaneously been watching and discussing serious political speeches from the floor of the Japanese Parliament, much to the amazement of parents and educators throughout the country.  As Joichiro Ito explains in this speech, the motivation stems from the teenagers engagement with interactive technology.  This clip show how the use of an interactive video website, in which viewers can comment directly on the video, has motivated teenagers to watch and intelligently comment on a speech by the leader of the Japanese Communist Party regarding complex labor relations.  As anyone who can speak Japanese can attest, the speech itself is not a particularly strong example of fiery and engaging oratory.  Rather, the interactive technology has caused these teens to become engaged with the complex and thought provoking political philosophy being espoused.  This video rasises questions about how this type of technology might be useful in engaging American youth in serious discussions and study of civic issues.

Click here for the Japanese Communist Party's niconicodouga videos.

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and the CEO of Neoteny. He is on the board of Technorati and helps run Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of Six Apart Japan the weblog software company. He is the board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, etology Inc and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching "The Sharing Economy" as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a weblog where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.