If you open the column,
Short video has become an extremely eye-catching media landscape in this era.
The video in just a few minutes or even tens of seconds captures the colorful moments of daily life, is a glimpse of fireworks in the city, is a silhouette of humanistic customs, and is a quick view of social conditions. In the flowing picture of short videos, the world is unfolding at the speed of light. Regardless of occupation, regardless of age, as long as the mobile phone is in hand, there will be "unstoppable" fun. But on the other hand, many people are also thinking about the speed and quality of information dissemination, fragmented expression and knowledge coherence, superficial prevalence and deep thinking exit.
Undoubtedly, short videos are deeply involved in the construction of people’s spiritual and cultural life. From now on, this edition will open the column "Observation of Short Video Cultural Phenomenon", sort out the deep logic and media characteristics of short video popularity, analyze the internet users’ emotions and popular cultural psychology behind "everyone brushes short videos", and try to put forward feasible suggestions on opening short videos correctly.
Many people did not expect that short videos could be so short. Most short videos are recorded by mobile phones: in a few minutes or even tens of seconds, a complete unit of expression has been completed-the theme, the characters, the small plot twists and turns, and all the necessary elements are available. Perhaps, people can re-recognize the expressive potential of image symbols: short image editing may show more meaning than expected. We can often see on the Internet that a two-hour movie is compressed into a short video introduction of eight or nine minutes, and the ins and outs of the story have clearly emerged.
In contemporary culture, the tension between large-scale works and small-scale works is unprecedented. Some people love forty episodes of TV series, and many fans continue to follow online novels with millions or even more than ten million words. A few pages of short stories or lines of poems do not seem to be "enjoyable"; On the other hand, "jokes", jokes, talk shows and cross talks are short, and Weibo was once limited to 140 words. Short video is obviously a masterpiece of "small". Are there any works shorter than tens of seconds of image symbols?
Many experts always follow an explanation model for small works: the pace of life is getting faster and faster, and many people are as busy as gyroscopes. They have no time or patience to deal with those large works. The era of WeChat has arrived, and a message reaches the other side of the world within half a second. So many things happen and disappear so quickly, all walks of life and personal senses must mobilize and do their best to adapt to this speed. At this time, the birth of short video coincides with its meeting. Of course, this explanation quietly shields another possibility: do people just enjoy and not resent the galloping pace control of life?
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As an echo of this rhythm of life, the video length of several minutes or even tens of seconds is only an external appearance, and what is important is that the meaning of image symbols is unobstructed. From news scenes, pet amusements, and fitness tips to a dance, a song, and a game clip, the clear content of various short videos is like a concise table. There is nothing that needs to be pondered over and over again; The decoding of symbolic images or prototypes is rather gilding the lily. Easy browsing and unimportant topics just fill the time gap that has not been covered by busy work.
However, easy browsing, unimportant themes, faster and faster pace of life or image symbols are precisely the contents criticized by many humanistic intellectuals. Easy browsing can only swallow those cultural fast foods that lack nutrition. After the spiritual space is full of inferior products, classic culture no longer has a place to live. Worryingly, easy browsing and unimportant topics are training a superficial reading style. With short space and clear content, people’s eyes and thoughts can only adapt to some cultural fragments. Thick cultural classics and abstruse phrases are overwhelmed, and movies, music and paintings with unfamiliar forms are decisively abandoned because they don’t know what they mean. Even so, humanistic intellectuals have no reason to advocate an absurd premise: obscurity is the symbol of cultural value. However, they are worried about a lack of ideological ability. If the superficial reading style evolves into spiritual normality, and if analysis, research, doubt and criticism are all regarded as dazzling skills that make much ado about nothing, then the spiritual quality of the nation may decline rapidly from the level set by classical culture. Of course, this concern goes far beyond the scope of classics reading. When the ideological ability is incompetent, people will certainly explain the complex cultural structure and even historical phenomena in various self-righteous ways.
When the superficial reading style is traced back to the source, many humanistic intellectuals openly contradict the current pace of life. Whether it is the efficiency of the production system, the speed of economic and commodity turnover, the transportation system and the cultural media, the industrial society is driving the great speed-up of history. From the worldly wealth growth, the iterative upgrading of scientific knowledge to the numerous information received by the senses, people can find the profound consequences of this speed-up in various fields. However, the fundamental question that a group of humanistic intellectuals are trying to ask is: where is the accelerated history going? It can be seen that there are still many injustices, disasters, disparity between the rich and the poor or the competition for resources has not slowed down. Man is hurrying along under the lash of his own desires. A faster pace of life is usually associated with more income. However, is more money greater happiness?
Philosophers advocate living a "contemplative life", and they use "hyperactivity" to describe this restless mental state. However, the weak doubts of humanistic intellectuals cannot interfere with the firm progress of technical logic. The explosion of trains, ships, jets, satellites, mobile phones and the Internet is producing one after another effects. Questioning "fast" is obviously behind the times, including the speed of operation in the field of spiritual consciousness. With the rapid development of transportation in industrial society, the dull mental consciousness has to keep up with the pace. Statistics show that theoretical schools and new concepts have multiplied since the 20th century. The computing speed of human brain is limited, so it can transfer the fast calculation to the machine-it is said that the fastest computer can calculate 54,902 trillion times per second. "Fast" is an irresistible command, whether it is the production of theoretical concepts, the speed of calculation or anything else.
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The acceleration of industrial society depends largely on machines, and at the same time, machines produce new symbols: images. Since the invention of the camera in 1839, image symbols began to enter life. After the continuous evolution of cameras, projectors, various auxiliary editing and transmitting equipment to the Internet and mobile phones, image symbols have finally developed into a mature ideographic system, and have quietly changed the social and cultural structure with a large area of penetration. Once upon a time, taking pictures was a luxury, and only rich children could own cameras and master this fashionable artistic skill; Subsequent film screening requires more perfect social conditions, and indispensable cinemas and screening equipment as public cultural facilities have won social and financial support. Television began to change this situation. Although TV was once a cultural luxury, this machine soon sneaked into the family as an ordinary household appliance together with refrigerators, microwave ovens and air conditioners.
If the cinema usually stands in the art category, then the TV set is interspersed between the gossip at home or the smell of dishes on the table. Television not only carries movies to the living room of the apartment, but more importantly, it becomes an intimate part of daily culture. There is a strong family atmosphere around the long TV series. Wearing household clothes, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea in the living room and dressing up for the cinema are two completely different cultural behaviors. Today’s TV programs are more consciously appealing to citizens’ interests. Television not only inserts a large number of advertisements, but also has cooking, shopping, fishing, singing opera and other columns with strong secular flavor. Surprisingly, this small household appliance has completely changed the nightlife of society. After dinner, the number of social workers engaged in poker or mahjong entertainment suddenly decreased a lot, and the chess stalls under the street lamps and the people enjoying the cool chat almost disappeared. Of course, readers of books are also decreasing. Many people have recognized that the image symbols in TV are the most important tool for entertaining.
I believe that most TV practitioners have not estimated that the combination of the Internet and mobile phones will pose such a serious challenge to the TV industry. The challenge follows the successful experience of the TV industry, but it is implemented more thoroughly. The TV in the living room is reduced to a mobile phone in the palm of your hand, and people can choose the programs they watch at will according to their personal schedule and space. Like a dazzling array of supermarkets on the street, many video symbols are stored in major websites for people to choose from. Short video is undoubtedly the most sought-after commodity, and a complete viewing takes only a few minutes or even dozens of seconds; If the content of the short video is worth recommending, you can pass it on to interested people by tapping WeChat on your mobile phone. All the procedures of watching and spreading can be completed in a blink of an eye, which is indeed comparable to the fast pace of life.
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Short videos greatly increase people’s visual experience. In ancient society, most of people’s information and knowledge came from written reports. Simple means of transportation limit the radius of life, and the scope of seeing with one’s own eyes is very narrow. For example, how many ancient people have really seen the vast sea or lush virgin forests? Cameras or movie shows open another window of visual experience, and TV really brings great impact. Day after day, TV programs are everywhere, and people can already modify an old saying: what can’t you see if a scholar doesn’t go out? Compared with TV programs, short video narration pays more attention to human beings. If TV cameras tend to capture relatively grand, spectacular and public scenes, then mobile phones that record short videos go deep into every ordinary corner of life and collect all kinds of fireworks. With pictures and truth, a secular, noisy world began to be vividly restored between mobile phone screens.
Perhaps people can perceive a subtle difference: compared with the beautiful words left by the ancients, the image of agricultural civilization in many short videos has shrunk dramatically. The bright moon breeze, the ancient boat crossing, the starry Ping Ye and the fine grass breeze in the Tang and Song poems gradually disappeared, and the "society" in the short video pushed the natural scene to the front desk, occupying the center of the field of vision: streets, communities, shops, traffic, urban buildings, home dining tables and a corner of the campus; Dogs appearing on the screen of mobile phones are mostly family pets, ducks or swans swimming in the artificial lake in the park. Short video was born in modern society, and agricultural civilization is passing by. The generation who recorded short video with mobile phones paid relatively little attention to the image of agricultural civilization. Of course, humanistic intellectuals often evaluate this cultural handover in another sense. In their minds, the gap between short videos and text symbols is not the image of agricultural civilization, but the depth of thought. The warning of humanistic intellectuals is not to alienate or even give up text symbols because of the intuition of image symbols. Up to now, written symbols are still the base camp of human social and cultural classics. The shooting of images can neither express the metaphysical "Tao" nor record the delicate emotional ripples in the heart.
Since the advent of the camera, image symbols have continuously explored their own performance characteristics and rhetorical strategies. The montage of pushing, pulling, leaning, leaning and splitting the lens shows the development history of image symbols. There is no doubt that movies are a collection of various lens languages. The reason why movies can undertake tortuous and complicated narratives is precisely because the image symbols already have a set of expressive ability comparable to the text symbols. Compared with the twists and turns of story statements in movies, the inherent logic of MTV lens language is melody and symbol. Like lyric poetry in written symbols, MTV tries to produce lyrical image symbol organization. However, these explorations are too far away from short videos.
Just like the vulgar spoken language in daily life, short videos only use rough lens language: either call out the mobile phone software for some simple editing, or shoot a shot all the time. The film is surrounded by a separate cultural tribe: famous directors, actors with high prices, staggering investment or box office income, and the refined camera language is the business of this cultural tribe; There is another cultural tribe around TV: those TV reporters with cameras on their shoulders are responsible for shooting all kinds of serious news, and their lens language is authoritative, standard, dignified and lively. In contrast, a variety of short videos record various folk activities, which are lively, vigorous, provocative and humorous; The public acts as both cultural consumers and cultural producers. The economic benefits brought by traffic may be just an unattainable ideal, however, even without economic benefits, it can’t stop the public from getting high. Just as the self-entertainment of karaoke doesn’t care about the singing level, the quality of short video lens language is also insignificant.
Another thing that many people didn’t expect is that such a short video can be watched for so long. The screen of the mobile phone swiped left and right, which consumed the whole morning unconsciously. What did you remember in one morning? Various short videos create kaleidoscope-like fragments mixed together. Some people think that the kaleidoscope-like fragments are just typical feelings of post-modern society. Has postmodernism really arrived? This is not such an important question. I would rather pay attention to the evolution prospect of two tendencies behind short videos: First, the combination of mobile phones, the Internet, video symbols and the public is forming a certain degree of cultural carnival. How to preserve and even inspire the public’s cultural initiative? Secondly, the worries of humanistic intellectuals are not unfounded. Will superficial reading methods lower the cultural level of products and bad money drive out good money? The competition between the two tendencies is not overnight, but involves a long theoretical story pedigree, but a large number of short videos will continue to write a new chapter.
(Author: Nan Fan, a special researcher at the Research Center for Literary Criticism of Fujian Normal University)