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same junior high school as ALOHA started to participate in the HFS and reported
additional information, including the response of the school.
The ALOHA thread on 2channel failed due to attack by scripts at the beginning
of January 2011, and the HFS of ALOHA was settled by mid-January.
14.6 Analysis of ALOHA's Case
The HFS is composed of two elements: platforms and platform users. The HFS of
ALOHA involved three platforms. Information-offering about ALOHA began with
2channel, which was the main stage of the HFS, and was followed by the news
websites JAWS and HAWK, which reprinted information from 2channel. Although
these are independent platforms, information sharing among them occurred to some
extent through the contributors who exchanged information among them.
Platform users involved in HFS can be classified into four types on the basis of
'search' and 'post' activity (Fig.
14.3
). The first type of users is known as 'Lurkers',
who do not search or post anything. Lurkers are users who only read. The second
type of users is 'Solitaries'. They search by themselves but do not post results.
Solitaries are searching for self-satisfaction. The third type of users is 'Galleryites',
who do not search but do post responses to HFS activity. In contrast, the fourth type
of users, called 'Contributors' in this study, cooperate with searches and offer
information to others. Contributors can be classified according to their main source
of information: 'online' contributors and 'offline' contributors. Contributors can
also be divided into two other groups: 'active' contributors who search and offer
information continuously, and 'temporal' contributors who cooperate with HFS
transiently. Thus, there are four types of contributors.
It is difficult to specify the contributors in the ALOHA case because almost all
contributors posted anonymously to the HFS platforms. One exception was the
thread about ALOHA on 2channel, in which contributors' posts could be identified
to some degree because each post was displayed with a daily unique ID. Active
contributors who were identifiable on 2channel included MANTIS (who
investigated ALOHA's after-school lesson), HUNTER (who reached out to
acquaintances of ALOHA), and MOLE (one of ALOHA's school mates) (all
names are tentative). Of these contributors, HUNTER can be classified as an
online-active contributor (On-A) and both MANTIS and MOLE as offline-Active
contributors (Off-A). Figure
14.4
shows the main contributors in ALOHA's case.
Temporal contributors can similarly be classified into two groups: online-
temporal contributors (On-T) offer information found in online searches or import
information from other platforms, and offline-temporal contributors (Off-T) offer
offline information, which is important for filtering and validating ambiguous
information.
Generally, the process of HFS can be illustrated as follows (Fig.
14.5
). First,
information as a beginning (such as information about someone's illegal or
immoral act) is offered on a platform. Of the participants who are interested in
