35 2 Contentious Politics and the Emergence of a Connected and Transnational “Public Sphere” “Connective Sociality” and “Latent Public Opinion” in Post-Democratic and Post-3/11 Japan Fabian SCHÄFER Abstract The rise of digital media and the trend towards more privatized forms of com- munication and user-generated content have long challenged the traditional idea of a mass-media-based public sphere. More recently, discussions about privacy and surveillance epitomize the ongoing process of reconfiguration and negotiation between private and public, as well as local and global, prompting us to reconsider the quality of the public sphere or spheres, and its signifi- cance and function in contemporary society qua universal norm. At the same time, the development of digital technologies itself has contributed to new, technologically based, “semi-public” spaces on Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. These new media forms evade any simplifying categoriza- tion into the private or the public. Given the rise of the “connective sociality” ( tsunagari no shakai-sei ) (Kitada Akihiro) generated by the users of these new media forms, emphasizing the act of communication above communication’s content (i.e., social connections through “re-tweets” and “I-likes” of “memes,” instead of verbalized discourse), it has become necessary to conceptually come to terms with the political status of such “semi-public spheres,” along with their relation to and interdependence with the traditional public sphere. I propose to define this new form of an informal or semi-public sphere – forms of political contestation in particular – from the perspective of their political and mass-mediated (in-)visibility as “latent public opinion” (Shimizu Ikutarō) based on digitally “connected action” (L. W. Bennett and A. Sanderberg), and, thus, as what Azuma Hiroki has tried to grasp as “general will 2.0.” Ac- cordingly, one shouldn’t consider this development as something to be merely criticized, but see it as a possibility not only for the emergence of alternative political spheres but also as an impetus to think of new methodological ap- proaches for sociological and political research into recent forms of political contestation in post-democratic and post-3/11 Japan.