Being Tokyo

Rotation curation, or RoCur for short, is one of the most fun and innovative ways to use Twitter. A rotation curation account has a different host every week, sharing their experience of living in a country or city. The idea began in December 2011 when @Sweden was launched. https://twitter.com/PeopleofLeeds was the first Rotation Curation (or RoCur for short) account for a city and soon there were RoCur accounts popping up across the world. RoCur accounts can be fascinating to follow because even if you’ve lived in a place your whole life, the chances are curators will appear who you haven’t met and whose experience is different from your own.

The Origins Of Being Tokyo

In 2014 I had the chance to curation @WeAreAdl, the Adelaide RoCur account. It was a lot of fun. For a small city, Adelaide has a vibrant social media scene that shares good information on living and working the city, helped on by @WeAreAdl, The Adelaide Show (you can read about my interview with them) and @SocAdl, who host regular live and online meetings and events.

Looking around, I couldn’t find a RoCur account for Tokyo. I put the word out and it seemed folks were interested in the idea. So, with the help of a locally-based journalist, Richard Smart, I decided to setup @BeingTokyo, create a little website, and start looking for volunteers. A few weeks later, @BeingTokyo is alive, with close to 600 followers and volunteers lined up into the New Year.

Some Further Hopes

Since moving to Tokyo, I’ve been a little disappointed at the social media scene here, especially the negativity from many expats about life in Japan. I’ve always said the most important part of social media is the social, not the media, but it felt like there wasn’t much socialising, community-building, or positive and constructive sharing of information going on.

Perhaps that era of social media is over and snark and cynicism has won. I don’t know. It feels to me that something like @BeingTokyo can resist the trend a little and bring some light into people’s week. So far the response has been really good and it seems a lot of folks are learning more about Tokyo from seeing the city through different people’s eyes every week.