Author | , and its degree of spread is beyond people’s imagination.
In February this year, a blogger with tens of millions of fans named "thurman cat cup" posted a video saying that she found two domestic first-grade winter vacation homework books in Paris, France, and shouted from the air "First grade class eight" Qin Lang".
The video went viral, became a hot search topic, and was immediately forwarded by many media outlets. Later, netizens claiming to be Teacher Qin Lang and Uncle Qin Lang left messages in the comment area, and "Uncle Qin Lang" even started a live broadcast to respond to the matter.
A fake news carnival planned by tens of millions of fans and the mcn behind it, and countless unknown netizens participated in spreading it, has just begun.
At that time, even if it was true or false, judging from the text alone, this "news" just seemed like a common joke. In today's terms, it was just "fun" and did not carry any substantial public value and value. Valid information.
However, voices questioning the authenticity of the information were rarely heard until a notice came down. It was officially confirmed that "primary school student Qin Lang lost his winter vacation homework" was a man-made fabrication.
A few months later, the self-media blogger "Cat Cup" who originally posted the joke was proven to be a fabrication, and the video was shot and performed according to the script. Because the whole incident was so widely circulated, the internet celebrity blogger had to apologize as required by the police.
was responsible for the incident and apologized. This serious incident now has an entry on Baidu Encyclopedia. The writing style is similar to a major social event: the 2.16 "Qin Lang lost his homework in Paris" incident.
From "true" to "false", is the apology because it hurts public feelings, or is it to maintain the authenticity of the public information field? In this case, it seems like neither.
A few months later, no one cares whether there really is a primary school student "Qin Lang" in the world. Even if there is, no one cares whether he finally found his homework or whether he finally had to complete his homework.
The initial explosion of this matter is actually worth considering. Overnight, the whole country knew that a primary school student named Qin Lang had lost his homework in Paris. They retweeted it and expressed sympathy and comfort in a playful and entertaining spirit.
In fact, the public sentiment behind this is simple and easy to explore. In this narrative scenario, whether "Qin Lang lost his homework" was lost or deliberately "forgotten", and then was picked up in a foreign country and was announced nationwide. This kind of convenience was not experienced by previous generations when they were studying, and it is also caused by the inescapable information network in this era.
This sense of contrast creates a sense of humor and comedy. Funny and helpless, these are emotions, and the surge of traffic in a short period of time is often public emotions rather than rational values.
Faced with overwhelming traffic, anyone with a sense of network will find ways to catch it. As a result, a series of plots such as "Uncle Qin Lang", "Qin Lang's mother" and "Returning Homework" were put in place, forming a decent news tracking path. The initial source of
's popularity did not come from the specific person himself, but from a constructed symbol that people associated with their own experiences in a specific period (peak tourist season) to varying degrees, thus spontaneously forming jokes.
From beginning to end, "Qin Lang who lost his homework" was a joke. The joke isn't even about "Qin Lang" himself.
If we pursue truth from the beginning, everyone will ask more questions before forwarding, and the media will confirm the "5ws" (when, where, why, who, and what) before following the traffic. These basic elements to build real information were not available when the joke was first spread, and no one cared about it. The era of overwhelming
short videos has fed the information-receiving habits of a generation of netizens. To a certain extent, it has also allowed viewers to develop automatic detachment and desensitization from the flood of information, and has developed a way of interpreting half-truths and half-false situations. The ability to extract reflections of real life.
The "ability" here cannot be completely equated with ability, but a kind of inertia of doubt. To be precise, be suspicious of information related to yourself, and at the same time, maintain a certain entertainment attitude toward information that is not directly related to you.
’s ubiquitous scene performance jokes, distant happenings that are updated by the minute on Weibo, and there is a complete video record at the moment of the occurrence, the authenticity of these moments cannot withstand scrutiny, and cannot be tolerated by an audience. Take more than a minute to think it over.
Therefore, when people saw the short video of "Qin Lang lost his homework" for the first time, they may not fully believe it, or in other words, they did not care so much about the authenticity of "Qin Lang", but habitually extracted certain things from the scene text. Real life meme, i.e. "A Chinese elementary school student lost his winter vacation homework while traveling to a foreign country."
This is a rough summary of the incident, consisting of several key words such as "primary school students", "winter vacation homework", "Paris" and "travel". It evokes a general public sentiment, which coincides with the sentiments of most Chinese people. Growth experiences, such as childhood complaints about winter vacation homework, sympathetic but helpless and kind ridicule of "Qin Lang", even extend to lamenting the burden of exam-oriented education that "question makers" can't shake off.
Even if "The primary school student lost his homework" is just an ordinary missing person notice, whether it is true or false, its influence and spread are not large. Just like a title, there is no content and no story. But when this title was widely circulated, a spontaneous "title party" began to fill it with personal creations.
Facing the overwhelming traffic, it is impossible for an Internet celebrity blogger with tens of millions of fans not to try to catch it. As a result, "Cat Cup" began to fill in the content of the title, and there were a series of "follow-ups" performed according to the script, such as "find the parents" and "return the homework". Turning a sentence into a story has fed a large number of netizens who are naturally addicted to stories.
A basic causal logic is: traffic will feed falsehoods and shape the soil of falsehoods. Of course, this is not a new conclusion, but has been repeatedly verified by network incidents in the past ten years.
In this process, it is difficult to say that the audience is completely passive. A performance of just a few seconds and with only a few screenshots can also trigger discussions or even arguments in the comment area that have nothing to do with the "plot" (or "facts"). What is important is that the views and experiences that everyone shares or collides with each other are the psychological world that is consciously constructed in this mimetic environment.
In short, during the widespread fermentation of the "Qin Lang lost his homework" incident, netizens are not completely passive information receptors, nor are they professional gatekeepers striving for truth. In fact, people only feel truly hurt when their groups begin to discuss "reality" on a large scale.
In the 1960s, the French experimentalist film art master Guy Debord first proposed the concept of "spectacle society". "In various societies where modern production conditions dominate, the entire social life appears as a huge The accumulation of landscapes. Everything we have experienced directly has left us and entered a kind of performance. "Generally refers to a kind of social performance and show constructed by sensibility and observability.
From the industrial age to the technological revolution, and even today’s so-called “post-truth” era, we are still surrounded by various “social landscapes” and even immersed in them. However, there is still a question mark as to whether it is passive immersion or active immersion.
Now, with the development of self-media over the years, we have received and even become accustomed to too many short videos based on false information. From Mi Meng a few years ago to the various fragmented scenes active on Weibo hot searches today, "happenings" that are not considered news, from straightforward creation of things out of nothing to exquisite packaging and emotional marketing that avoid the important and trivial, "fake" The shape has long been ever-changing, moistening things silently.
What is worth asking is why "Qin Lang lost his homework" and "the death of the poor No. 1 scholar" set off such a large area of traffic waves? Are people too gullible, or are the stories made up too true?
Not long ago, a group of online mcns were shut down, and some bloggers were sentenced for false advertising and other crimes. Among them, a blogger "Zhao Ling'er" with more than two million fans made up a love story about "encountering a boy from Daliang Mountain" by directing and acting himself. From a chance encounter to a two-way relationship, from self-reliance to inspirational entrepreneurship, the two bloggers worked hand in hand to sell fake goods, and even a set of scripts were repeatedly used by other Internet celebrities, and they followed the same pattern.
We have to admit that we actually live in a world where "truth" is expensive. Half-truths and half-false stories, scripts that conform to one's own biases and expectations, are the easiest information path to rely on in an exhausted life. Some people even feel hurt after the truth is revealed, not because they were deceived, but because the deception was revealed.
If the script can go on being written and the actors can go on acting, they are willing to always believe in the small world in the vertical screen, just like being addicted to short plays.
This is another form of "entertaining oneself to death". Nowadays, there are overwhelming exclamation points and headlines criticizing Internet celebrity bloggers for editing jokes. At the same time, there are still countless news events in the fog that urgently need to be truthful, and these really require time-consuming, The puzzle of human and legal costs may be given up by people citing the fatigue of life itself. Even if this is not their rational choice.
In this stage of alternation between old and new communication logic, people caught in it are not just victims, but also creators and consumers of mimetic life. What we need to do, in addition to distinguishing between true and false, is to also discern which things are true and false which are the most important, and which ones are slightly less important.
Of course, it is an undeniable fact that the greater the communication area and intensity, the more authentic the event will be in people’s perception. As for the media that caused such a large-scale spread, there is no doubt that the media collectively failed in their duties in this entire false traffic incident.
Audiences can be indiscriminately desensitized to the vast information flow, but the media must be vigilant and even need to maintain full sensitivity even more than before.
After all, before the wild horse breaks free, the reins are more important than the horseshoes.
Some of the pictures in the text come from the Internet
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Editor | Wu Qing
Typesetting | Bajin
Nanfeng Window New Media Produced
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