ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the social network site (SNS)'s user-facing interface, with a particular focus on its rendition from 2008, when it reigned as Japan's most used SNS. It reviews the process an individual user went through in 2008 when signing up with and logging on to mixi, and discusses how its web interface affects the actions and experiences of users, particularly members of various minority groups. The chapter explains that mixi's web interface has its own imagination about inclusion and exclusion and the ability to order users' actions and experiences based on that imagination. It explores the complex neighborhood of relations within and around mixi's interface. The chapter suggests that an SNS and the design of its web interface not only present an uneven setting for 'inter-'cultural communication, but also play significant roles in the dynamic push and pull between homogenizing and heterogenizing discursive forces themselves.
