Line was initially established by a South Korean company Naver and it very quickly occupies Japanese market since the devastating Japanese tsunami had broken down many normal channels of communication. This disaster caused 18,000 people died and Japan’s phone system did not work at that time. People need to access the internet to contact their families, and Line Messenger was born under this situation. Only one year, Line reaches 50 million active users (Bushey, 2014). The most important function that Line has is sending direct messages and phone call to one person or a private group chat. Since Japanese people very cares about privacy. So, this direct social network protects their privacy and make them feel comfortable when sharing information to their friends and family (Neely, …show more content…
One of the most important functions is that it has an abundant sticker system. Catherine Shu talks about Line stickers in her article “the Secret Language of Line Stickers,” and she says line stickers are not just cute; it is an example of how media company impact and reinforce cultural trends. It reflects the cuteness culture in Japan, in the meantime it changed Japanese people communicating behaviors. Sometimes stickers can express some information that is hard to tell in words and they make people to save time by tapping a sticker. Moreover, to make consumers control the media power by themselves, line allows consumers to create their original sticker characters and sell them in the Line creators market, which means everyone can become a designer and participate inside the media industry (Riggal, 2014). Moreover, Line tries to use different media platforms to broaden their revenues after they got success in stickers. They created a cartoon series called “Line Town” and they have launched many retail Line friend stores globally to sell their line-character merchandise. They have developed many other apps with line characters. For example, people can put Line characters on photos through Line Camera. And, Line have many video game apps with their characters inside. People who use Line become a big fan of Line stickers so that they can use Line characters to create