For the past few years, I have been thinking about synlogue as well as the keyword fermentation. One day, when I was learning a piece called "Teika" about Fujiwara no Teika, I learned that there is a part in which Shite and Waki spin phrases together like a couplet, which I call a synlogue. I learned that this was called a synlogue. From there, I learned that in the field of Japanese language pedagogy, Professor Mizutani Nobuko coined the term "synlogue" and has written many studies on the subject. As a speaker of Japanese, French, and English, I found it intuitively easy to understand and interesting that synlogue is easy to perform in Japanese, which uses a lot of aizuchi. It was just at the time when my daughter was switching from a Japanese-language preschool to a French-language kindergarten, and the fact that it seemed difficult to perform Japanese-style synlogue in French, where the subject cannot be removed, made sense to me in light of my own experience when I was a child.

But is synlogue really a phenomenon unique to the Japanese language?　I support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the structure of thought differs depending on the language used, but I am also wary of overly specific cultural theories. Even if synlogue is more likely to occur in Japanese culture as a way of speaking, are there not "synlogue-like" features in other languages as well?　While thinking about this, I was searching through the literature and learned that cultural anthropologist Junzo Kawada described it as "synlogue" based on his observation of the Mossi people in West Africa who gather at night to perform fairy tales. The word "synlogue," consisting of the prefix syn meaning "with," "together," or "synchronously," and the suffix dialogue meaning "to talk," translates directly into Japanese as "synlogue. I also noticed that the concept of "sense of coexistence" studied by anthropologist Daiji Kimura, who also referred to Dr. Kawada's synlogue, can also be connected to the effect of synlogue as explained by Dr. Mizutani.

Dominic Cheng, "Mirai wo tsukuru wotoba: kagareta nashiwa wo tsunagu ni tsuite" (Words that Create the Future: To Connect the Unintelligible) | Shinchosha

The detailed process up to this point was written in the series "To Remember the Future," which ran on the Shinchosha website from 2016 to 2019, and then summarized in the book "Words that Create the Future" (Shinchosha, published in January 2020). What I did was to connect the events studied separately by Dr. Mizutani, Dr. Kawada, and Dr. Kimura and to redefine them in the context of contemporary communication.

What I did not expect was the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic right after the book was published, and the increase in the number of people asking me about synlogue as I entered the remote working life. It is also difficult to share body gestures such as nods, which makes synlogue difficult. Around the same time, people working at various companies frequently told me that there were fewer opportunities for people to chat and get to know each other better, because they did not know each other well. When I talked about synlogue at such times, they often agreed with me, saying, "I see, so you mean that synlogue is not possible. Also, when I talked about synlogue when I was interviewed by people from NTT docomo's research department, they later developed a voice communication system to realize synlogue online, and I was invited to experience it at an open house they held just recently.

NTT docomo: Developed a voice communication system to realize online Japanese-style conversation "synlogue" <September 29, 2022>.

Press Release : NTT docomo Develops Voice Calling System to Realize Japanese-style Conversation "synlogue" Online | News | NTT docomo

In 2019, we conducted an experiment using TypeTrace with Takashi Ikegami of the University of Tokyo, Hiroki Kojima of the same lab, and Mizuki Oka of the University of Tsukuba to study how the perception of each other's presence changes under the influence of technology. TypeTrace is a media artist, Taku Endo We developed TypeTrace as a chat system for our research. We created a special chat system in which the other person could see the typing history, but we also created a version in which the characters being typed could be seen in real time, and compared conversations using each. We compared conversations using each of these chat systems, and were able to show through quantitative analysis that the chat system in which both parties' typing was visible in real time was the most "lively" of all. The conclusion of this study was that in an environment where information is transmitted concurrently, conversations are activated in both directions.

[Analysis and Design of Social Presence in a Computer-Mediated Communication System](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.641927/full)

By the way, this paper did not use the concept of "synlogue". Instead, we used the social psychological concept of "social presence" to examine how well we perceive each other's presence. This is because the concept of "synlogue" has not yet been studied in the English-speaking world, and there was not enough space to explain it in a way that English-speaking reviewers would understand, even if I cited the Japanese literature. I also wanted to write in English about "co-presence," which I mentioned with synlogue in the above book, but this was also because it was difficult to explain the research conducted by Dr. Daiji Kimura in the context of cultural anthropology in the context of interface design. I was not good enough.

I am currently co-authoring a paper with Olaf Witkowski of Cross Labs that explains synlogue in English and discusses its significance and potential for research in the 21st century. He is a former member of the Ikegami Lab and his research straddles the boundary between Artificial Life (ALife) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like me, he is a French-speaking polyglot who also speaks Polish, Vietnamese, English, etc. When I mentioned synlogue to him while we were discussing other research, he showed great interest.

The Potential of ALIFE ｜ Transcript of the Dialogue ｜Mizuki Oka and Dominic Chen (Part 2)

[Approaching the Possibilities of ALIFE ｜ Transcript of Dialogue ｜ Mizuki Oka and Dominic Chen (Part 2)

I would like to post a preprint when it is completed, but I am currently compiling various materials to complete it (this article is partly a research notebook that I am writing to think about while writing for that purpose).

Here is what I am trying to achieve with this article

In thinking about this, there is an example of synlogue that I have summarized in my book, which gives us a great deal of insight: <aside> <but first, let's take a look at the concept of "synlogue" in the following way.

[Living in "synlogue" between disasters (Junko Takamori)

Open Team Science

Utilizing "Co-creation" in Rehabilitation - Inclusive Make-a-thon using 3D printer

[Are you listening to the "voice" of the elderly?] (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jagn/25/2/25_5/_article/-char/ja)

A study of the function of interactive communication tools to support learning

Although the fields are diverse - disaster ethnography, open science, nursing, rehabilitation, geriatric care, and communication in learning - they all have one thing in common: communication is seen as a serious problem in each case.

Prior to joining the university, I worked as an online community designer for my own company, where I observed the light and dark sides of human communication on the Internet. As a person who spent my teenage years at the dawn of the Internet in the 1990s, I have seen the Internet transcend national borders. As someone who spent my teenage years at the dawn of the Internet in the 1990s, I believed that the Internet could be a tool for people to understand each other beyond national borders, but before I knew it, the Internet had turned into a place where incomprehension swirled.

Was this an inevitable consequence of technological progress? Having been involved in the design and management of online communities, albeit on a small scale, I don't think so. I think it was a spectacular design error, the result of a universally oriented technology born in a very specific place, Silicon Valley, that combined ingenuity to capture people's attention for business purposes.

I was first attracted to the concept of synlogue in Noh theater, then in Japanese linguistics, and then in cultural anthropology, because I felt it offered a different kind of design guidance for digital communication. I am sure that I will continue to verbalize the reasons for this in my papers and other publications, but for my own personal reasons, I think it is first and foremost because I myself am in need of synlogue. As an Asian ethnic minority who grew up in French-speaking countries followed by English-speaking countries, and as a person with a stuttering disability, the success or failure of communication with people who are different from myself is a matter of the utmost urgency for me. Synlogue is, first of all, a technique for "getting close to the other person" in a very simple way.

If we look at it from the perspective of media theory, language is another communication tool, and even there, there is the possibility of discussing it from the perspective of "design. There are synlogue-like methods when using Japanese, but even in French or English, there are other ways to be intimate with others, such as non-verbal gestures and ways of showing respect. When we think in this way, we can find common characteristics in other communication tools - including digital ones. We believe that there is an opportunity to generalize the essence of synlogue there.

After this, there are many issues to be addressed, such as rethinking the similarities between synlogue and dialogue and examining their hybrid form, and comparing monologue and Bateson's practice of metalogue in addition to synlogue and dialogue. In any case, I would like to proceed with the study of synlogue itself in a synlogical manner.