How to Use LINE

If you have a greeting from a friend with whom you haven’t made even one contact for ten years, it is likely to be through LINE. That is because this Japan-made social networking service application can remember and display contact information of an old friend, if you ever had had a phone call with him or her. While most Japanese still do not know how to use this convenient application, more teenagers are addicted to it, sometimes causing even a murder.

LINE application was developed by NHN Japan, a branch of South Korea based corporation, after the Great East Japan Earthquake two years ago. Using cell phone number as ID for an account, users can make phone call or chat with friends for free. Within two years, the number of users exceeded 150 millions in the world.

The popularity of the application is based on its feature that communication would be limited in a group of friends, comfortably smaller than Facebook or Twitter. Taking advantage of its convenience, students often use the application for sharing information about school and friends, in which they feel secured within the network of friendship. According to a report of NHK TV news, LINE is the most frequently used social network service for high school student, leaving Twitter and Facebook behind, with 52.8% users among whole high school smart phone holders in a poll.

However, human communication always brings friction in human relations. Students sometimes use LINE for excluding one of their friends with defamation or putting someone out of the network. Fabrication of a photo picture that embarrasses one person or sending words like “kill” or “get out of our sight” would be frequent abuses. The motivation of a sixteen years old girl to kill her friend in Hiroshima last month was reported to be as badmouths on LINE application.

In this country with extremely dense population, human relation is often focused on excluding or distinguishing someone from a community. People in the community feel safe by confirming oneself still remaining within the group. That is the reason why LINE overtook open networks such as Facebook or Twitter in Japan.

While LINE makes grouping the people easy, it is also easy for a group to make someone being isolated. In this small country, hard to evacuate over the surrounding seas, isolated person is too uneasy to live. Isolation is sometimes a traditional way for adjustment of population in this nation. It is important for the nation to use this kind of tool for saving someone’s life or helping pursuit of happiness for all.