In 2013, a ‘murder mystery game’, commonly known as Death Wears White, was translated and introduced from the UK, making it the first scripted murder game available to domestic players at the time. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the game was brought to the public’s attention by the hit variety show “Star Detective”. In the tabletop era, scripted kill was strictly a game for deduction enthusiasts, with the key to the game being the players’ “reeling in the culprit” (i.e. the real culprit) according to the timeline of their respective characters. But as murder mystery games have evolved from a traditional tabletop game to an offline experience similar to escape rooms, the game has evolved into a diverse storyline.

The player is immersed in the game with the plot and the characters. But usually, we think of immersive gaming as an escape from reality. But is escapism necessarily negative? Can escapism also be a purposeful escape, a considered and positive escape?

Soul of the game

The Dutch scholar Johan Heazinha has spoken in his book The Man of Play about how one of the most important characteristics of play is its isolation from the space of ordinary life. An enclosed space, whether physical or conceptual, is marked out and circled from the everyday environment. In this space, games are held and rules pass.

Murder mystery game succeeds in shaping such a perfect space for play. During these five hours, 14 NPCs and six players work together to interpret the script, and with the alternating scenes of sadness and happiness, the “life is like a play, it’s all about acting” feature of Script Kill is brought into full play, and players are able to experience all the flavours of life and escape the monotony of everyday life.

The performance is not influenced by a single factor such as the script, but rather by the player’s “secondary creation” during the game interaction. Thus, the player’s psychological grasp of the scripted characters, the logical reasoning of the story, and even the interaction with the other players, the host and the non-player characters, all have a direct impact on the game experience. It succeeds, as Heczinha describes the connotations of classic games, in “allowing the innate human need for rhythm, harmony, substitution, change, opposition, climax and so on to unfold in its full richness”.

The script writer and the facilitator are recognised as the soul of the game. The scriptwriter creates the script’s worldview, characterisation and story logic. The facilitator, on the other hand, needs to take control of the situation and guide the characters according to the actual situation in each scene, based on the players’ respective personalities, involvement and different understanding of the characters.

Lee Giggles is the author of a popular emotion book from last year, The Sound of Voices. Compared to the live-action search and interpretation scripts that are now on the market to kill, she says outright that her favourite is still the tabletop book, “Adding scene setting or NPC interaction is because the text of some scripts doesn’t bring you a good experience and requires external forces to make up for it in order for the player to integrate. But some of the books can make you believe that the character is yourself and that you can actually cry if he dies”.

The Voice is an old-fashioned play about delicate emotions, and when you search its reviews online, the general feedback from players is basically that it’s “too good to cry”. “Good crying” seems to be the reason why many people love a play. When we finished the game, the player playing as Yun Qi praised the group, “It was really great as my eyes hurt from crying.”

Emotional catharsis seems to be one of the reasons why many players indulge in the game. Tang Qin, editor-in-chief of the content division of Xiaohei Tan (the leading scripted killing service platform in China), told the journalist that the trend of scripted killing in the past two years has mainly shifted from a single hardcore reasoning to a multi-dimensional and comprehensive experience, from hardcore reasoning to an immersive experience, with more emphasis on users’ empathy and resonance. So this has led to the emotion book being particularly hot in the last two years, as it is more likely to resonate with users. Stanislavski has suggested that the process of transferring one’s emotions to bring out the best in a character is called ’empathy’. In contemporary psychoanalysis, empathy is the process by which an actor releases his or her own emotions, or the accumulation of emotions about the past, into the character he or she is playing, thus achieving an emotional catharsis.

Game researcher Hugh Bowen has found that role-playing games are the most emotionally stimulating genre because role-playing and first-person games rely most heavily on narrative structure, and narrative is one of the world’s oldest techniques for conveying emotion. In the world of scripted kills, everyone needs to take on the role of a character and watch the story from a first perspective, understanding the motivation behind every choice they make. The playwright and facilitator, as an omniscient God, then needs to rationalise these motivations during the course of the game.

In the world of the game, the DM uses his imagination to complete an important secondary creation of the script. Despite being virtual, it is still a different life that many players will only live once. According to Mo Zexi, murder mystery game has something in common with theatre performances, “It’s like a play where you can interact with the guests, where the play ends straight away and you can’t start over. Then it must be ensured that the effect is the best this time”. This challenges the DM and NPC’s ability to react on the spot, often needing to respond to unexpected audience interactions or some unexpected situations that fit the character and the plot.

David Ewalt, in Dice and Men: A History of Dungeons and Dragons, explains the appeal of such games. He points out that people often have an enduring fantasy in their lives, yet watching movies or playing video games does not allow them to actually experience and experience these fantasies, but realistic role-playing games offer players a way to enter these worlds and create a more enduring experience and more empathy.

Back to offline social

Hunt A Killer is a “murder mystery” game that has been a huge success over the past two years. Its founder, Ryan Hogan, told Fox Business that at this particular point in 2020, people are looking for a way to put down their devices and really connect with the people around them on a meaningful, deeper level. Traditional tabletop games, while also fun, lack the storytelling element, “and what we’re doing is creating a new experience where people can sit around a table, solve challenges and get excited about it.

For a growing number of players, scripted kills are both a form of entertainment and a means of social interaction. The extraordinarily long playtime of the game runs counter to the fragmented virtual social environment. Some figures however bear witness to the great demand for offline socialising and how the industry has been able to expand rapidly over the past few years.

In 2019, the number of scripted kill entity shops nationwide increased from 2,400 in 2018 to 12,000; by the end of 2020, the number of scripted kill entity shops had reached 30,000, a growth rate of 150%. According to the 2021 Physical Scriptkill Consumption Insight Report released by Meituan, over 70% of players are under the age of 30, with over 40% of them playing more than once a week.

While the reasons for being drawn to the game may vary, such as to satisfy a desire to reason, perform or take pictures, a new social model has been quietly formed as players sit face to face, put down their phones and engage in close interaction over hours of gaming. If players can’t find enough people they know to form a game, they go to the shop and play with strangers. When returning from gaming to reality, many players still manage to connect with each other.

For the game to become a popular entertainment activity, there are still two problems: firstly, the barrier to entry is high, players need to be able to be willing to spend 4 to 5 hours quietly reading scripts and concentrating on playing along with everyone else; secondly, in terms of content creation, the experience diminishes when players are able to find that there are still routines to follow after trying 50 to 80 scripts.

Perhaps, as the philosopher Bernard Sutz put it: “It is games that give us something to do when there is nothing else to do. We therefore call games ‘pastimes’ and see them as trivial fillers for the gaps in our lives. But they are so much more important than that. They are a clue to the future. For now, their careful cultivation may be our only salvation.” “It remains to be seen whether “murder mystery” games are a passing fad or whether they will grow into such a game worthy of “serious nurturing”.

One of the objectives of this project is to find a balance between cultural heritage (cultural tourism industry) and popular culture (young people), so this week we have further analysed and reflected on the trends and the current situation of the industry in relation to this theme

The travel industry is facing disruptive changes due to the impact of the epidemic. But no matter what the times are going through, the desire to travel, especially among young people, is very strong. This strong desire is in great contrast to the current downturn in the travel industry. New concepts and models such as micro-camping, micro-vacations and travel photography are also bringing an impact to destination travel. But the travel industry itself still has to find some second curves in the industry, especially for young people demand, how to attract younger groups?

Change of approach

Young people don’t bunch up and don’t follow the crowd
Traditional tourism products and destinations may not necessarily appeal to them, but rather cities with a strong personality, the ability to take photos or share some special experiences to show off on social media will stand out.

The decision making mechanism for consumer behaviour has been greatly compressed, with faster and more fragmented becoming a core feature of consumer psychology, and ‘consumer discovery’ being replaced by ‘content push’. Consumer initiative is being shaped by group sentiment. This has led to higher and different requirements for product communication in terms of content, form and visuals.
Linking products to consumer needs is more direct and important than communicating the product brand, and any product that needs to be explained will lose its chance of success. The faster and more direct the link, the greater the chance of realisation and the faster the conversion cycle and rate.
The giant consumer platforms formed on the basis of internet technology are increasingly losing the value of traffic, and as they create and accumulate traffic, they are also being backfilled by it. Thirst-quenching investments and operations have become their daily routine.
Small and beautiful, small and sophisticated, small and fast commercial terminals are breaking away from the large commercial model and coming into the proximity of people’s lives. The new ant hordes around small communities, office building attached properties, inside museums, scenic spots (and even on tour buses), cinemas, street vending, etc. will become the mainstream commercial bodies of the future. They will become direct, efficient and real-time linking sites, meeting every aspect of life’s needs in a myriad of niche formats.

Emotional needs and service experience

Traditional travel only talks about the good scenery of the destination
But ignore the emotional needs of young people
It’s time for cultural travel products to change from product-driven to emotion-driven

Companies in the field of cultural and creative industries have always been chasing innovative cultural and creative products, as well as emotion-driven cultural transformation and landing, and the cultural and creative products scattered in various scenes and warehouses are just like a chicken feather.

Entrepreneurs in different fields and industries are acutely aware of the cost, the depletion of stock and in-volume, and they feel the crisis of business relatively early.
A business doing children’s custom clothing e-commerce, initially with a fixed model sample to accept a piece of custom, two years to develop sales of more than 100 million, the product base SKU has more than 100, nearly 10,000 square meters of storage, had to embark on the road to scale to maintain sales, traffic and growth. The pressure of product innovation and stocking inventory during this period made him feel trapped in a difficult situation at any time. How do you innovate products to maintain an undefeated position and leadership in the consumer market? He thought that creativity and design were the only options.
The explosion of cultural and creative products, especially tide play, has tantalised many entrepreneurs in the consumer business. The leading tide play companies in Dongguan could not resist the temptation of the market and are all transforming from OEM to OBM, basically dying before they can get out of the gate, with the C-terminal market and consumption mechanism relentlessly striking back, making them understand the importance of culture, creativity and aesthetics.
Not only the cultural tourism industry, but also the food and beverage related industry is currently the most innovative field in terms of products, models and business models, and is also the track that capital has focused on in recent years. They are not only trying to innovate in food culture, product segmentation, consumer behaviour, service models and business mechanisms.

At a time when large supermarkets are struggling, small snack shops and brands are popping up all over the street, and the products and prices they are subject to are basically a physical recreation of the Poundland (e-commerce) model and strategy. With the exception of a few branded consumer foods that maintain low prices (dumping), the vast majority are unbranded or workshop branded products.
New business thinking such as “long-termism” and “all tracks are worth starting over” underpin most business investment and entrepreneurial behaviour. In reality, it is just a continual rehash of the stock market, a stage for the board.
Commodity inventory, consumer stock, aging traffic, etc. are destined to make entrepreneurship difficult, the essence of which is not in the market, but the majority of runs are just stock markets.
The source of the stock market lies in the lack of innovation in products and the lack of new content for consumption. Most products have survived for more than 20 years, and the application of technology still remains to meet basic functions and cannot touch on quality improvement, let alone changing lifestyles.

As the field of cultural and creative products comes to an end, it must break through the inner volume, break its own cage, analyse itself and find its best and most core competitiveness.
It must become a source of creative innovation and construction for new economies, new businesses, new products and new services; it should return to its essence and become a solution for business, providing creative strategies and means in different dimensions and orientations, and giving new value creation.
It should be an ecology that provides innovative values and market dynamics to different business forms and operations. Culture, creativity, design, planning, IP, etc. should all play an empowering role.
Cultural creation is a kind of thinking and a process, and this thinking and process should be predictable; cultural creation should output creative content and create new services, instead of just going to make products to output stock.

Need for a new label (city identity)

One attraction represents a tourist city
We say that classics never go out of fashion, but young people will really be interested in
A tourist attraction that has been around since grandpa’s generation?
In the internet age, it is always possible to use a new label
Refreshing the public image of a tourist city

IP interpretation and analysis, combing, IP incubation and planning, market planning, IP creation and story interpretation, brand building, product design and services, product strategy research and market analysis, supply chain management and services, brand building and marketing planning, content creation and promotion, live streaming, etc. should all become segments of cultural and creative business, so as to shape the city’s personality in a more three-dimensional way and thus gain core competitiveness.

To sum up, cultural and creative business is not a business form that deals with cultural and creative products, but a business operation model that uses cultural creativity to empower content creation, planning and design services, and innovative business operations, not to sell more stock, not to remove inventory, but to create incremental markets and promote rapid growth in new economic cycles.

·Introduction

City identity constitute the core of the cultural tourism economy. As a concentrated expression of the city’s individuality, cultural heritage has an obvious contribution to the cultural tourism economy. After the new archaeological discovery of Sanxingdui in 2021, the comprehensive income of Sanxingdui Museum Scenic Spot has achieved four times that of the same period in 2019 and six times that of the same period in 2020.¹ Therefore, questions related to how to use cultural heritage build city identity have attracted a large share of attention in debates.

·Question

For cities with relatively less rich cultural heritage resources (such as Sanxingdui in Guanghan mentioned above), as long as a good grasp of a cultural heritage can be established, a distinct city identity can be established. But for Nanjing, a city with 300 intangible cultural heritage², it has become a difficult problem to establish a distinct city identity.

This study contributes to use the cultural heritage of the Qinhuai River to build Nanjing’s city identity to combat the current problem of cultural homogeneity and promote the cultural tourism economy in Nanjing.

·Research Methodology

Aiming to understand how to use the cultural heritage of the Qinhuai River to build Nanjing’s city identity, this study principally conducts a research methodology of interpretivism. Based on interviews with stakeholders and target audiences and observations of moderately successful attempts in this field, this research employs the perspectives of hermeneutics, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to conduct discourse and case studies. However, since interpretivism is easily subject to the subjective bias of researchers, in order to solve this shortcoming, this study also extensively refers to related philosophical viewpoints, such as Global City³ and Holographic Urban⁴, to avoid overly subjective value judgments.

·Research

Although cultural heritage is an important embodiment of city identity, it’s often borrowed from popular culture in the process of dissemination. Among the many cultural and entertainment activities in London in summer 2022, several events with the theme of East Asian culture, such as the MIK Korean pop music festival from July 30 to 31⁵, and the HYDE JAPAN Japanese animation culture festival from July 22 to July 24⁶, are all based on pop culture, but It is worth noting that these activities are still interspersed with cultural heritage-related content, such as traditional costumes and food; another example is the 2.4 version of the Chinese game “Genshin”, which has received extensive international attention in recent years. The character “Yunjin” which designed based on Chinese opera culture, its tag ranked fifth on Twitter’s trend list after the game version was updated, and reached the second highest.⁷ Although its popularity is not all affirmation of Chinese opera, it makes more people have direct contact with Chinese opera. Popular culture brings more exposure to cultural heritage so that it is possible to gain recognition and acceptance. Therefore, the establishment of urban personality through cultural heritage should be combined with the form of popular culture.

Under the background of global urban theory, city identity is no longer only limited to the local, but needs to be combined with the background of globalization and metropolis, and consider the issues of mutual influence between countries and regions.⁸ From the perspective of holographic urban theory, cyberspace has also become a composite space-time outside of urban space, which is no longer “tangible” but a civilization that gradually tends to “invisible”.⁹

Therefore, the use of cultural heritage to establish urban personality should take into account the popularity, internationality and contemporaneity (The Internet age) in concrete practice.

·Intervention

The intervention of the research would like to be a system which combine short videos, online curation and cultural creative design.

Short videos is the way of story-telling. Using short videos as a carrier, combined with popular trends (such as memes, hot topics, etc.), tell the story of the Qinhuai River cultural heritage.

Online curation is a platform to integrate the narrative of the short video, explain the cultural heritage involved in the short video, and build a connection with cultural creative design.

Cultural creative design is the final destination, as a possible path for the project to extend to the cultural tourism industry.

·Audience

The project is mainly planned to be carried out on Douyin and tiktok, mainly for people who interested in culture and tourism.

·Concluding

The advantage of this project is that it solves the problem of fragmentation of short video creation, the overall idea is more systematic, and it can achieve interaction and transformation. The disadvantage is that short videos are in the form of popular culture, and there will still be a certain degree of restrictions on conveying the serious connotation of cultural heritage; in addition, because it is necessary to borrow popular hot spots as an attractive way, it may sometimes cause the target audience to pay attention when watching short videos. The point deviates from the cultural heritage and the urban personality of Nanjing.

At present, the project has completed the preliminary investigation, determined the list of cultural heritage, and has started the shooting of a series of short videos.

With the improvement of short video production technology, presenting narrative content in a few minutes-long works has increasingly become the pursuit of short video creators. If short video is regarded as a new text and narratology research object of fusion media, it can be found that the narrative form, narrative time, and temporal and spatial characteristics of narrative flow of short video have their own distinctive characteristics.

Short videos present a strong hybrid narrative feature. As far as narrative space is concerned, short videos focusing on family life are mostly based on three meals a day and warm interaction with family members. Waiting for performing arts to be integrated into family members’ conversations, taking a funny route; VLOGs of daily life record streams, mostly switching to different time and space scenes such as commuting to work, shopping parties, fitness and leisure, etc. to switch and collage the imagination of prosperous urban life; traditional cultural themes, Most of them win with ancient style and artistic conception, put appropriate characters in the corresponding landscaping and carry out related labor behaviors. In short, whether it is the rhythm of the beginning and the end, the contrast between the front and the back, the foreshadowing and flipping, or the close-up of the “highlight moment” of people and objects, the short video accommodates a variety of narrative art with great creative freedom and flexible space. The characteristics of the combination of culture, folk culture and popular culture.

With the improvement of short video production technology, presenting narrative content in a few minutes-long works has increasingly become the pursuit of short video creators. If short video is regarded as a new text and narratology research object of fusion media, it can be found that the narrative form, narrative time, and temporal and spatial characteristics of narrative flow of short video have their own distinctive characteristics.

In terms of narrative time, although many themes are devoted to deliberately imitating the natural time sequence (such as the growth of animals and plants, the spring planting, autumn harvesting and winter storage of agricultural civilization, etc.), the short video mainly rewrites the speed and slow performance of natural time, and its time rhetoric mainly includes: Two: Press the “accelerate” key, which imitates “slow” time. The former, such as reading movies and TV shows in three minutes, experiencing the beauty of a city in tens of seconds, and visiting famous mountains and rivers in tens of seconds, compressing and synthesizing the time of the scene changes over a long period of time with the technology of delayed photography, fully excavating And occupying the remaining fragmented time of people is the symbol of “occupying and depriving human beings of the last breathing space” in the era of attention economy. The latter, in addition to the not-so-new daily life narrative of slow time and slow life, is also about magnifying and decelerating details: the soft and shiny fur of a cheetah running becomes visible frame by frame, and the beautiful six sides of snowflakes fall. The shape is slowly frozen, or the sight is fixed on the “autumn in the old capital”, “the snow in the northern part of Saibei”, and so on, so that people can gain slow and quiet spiritual power from the deceleration of time.

The rhetoric about time and space in the short video is an image construction of the real society, which reflects the emotional configuration of modern people. Compared with the hysteresis of literature and art representing the emotions of the times, short videos can be called “instantaneous” art. It preserves countless “moments” closely related to ordinary people’s lives in a visual way, both as a way of socializing and as an emotional outlet. However, when modern people are in the anxiety of the “acceleration era”, they are afraid to take a step behind them, and they can grab short-term knowledge, skills and experience from short videos and quickly put them into practice in the workplace, family and life. The pursuit of efficiency has given birth to the desire for short videos to pursue “fastness” in their “shortness”. After all, the human mind is not a machine. For the alienated rebound, let it pursue a rhythm that conforms to the natural circadian rhythm, and “slow” becomes the real need of the mind. The time and space rhetoric of short videos are subject to human’s understanding of speed and the need for individualization of life.

In recent years, with the rise of new media sociology, new media represented by short videos are regarded as field investigations and ethnographic texts with the color of media landscape. In this sense, short videos construct and represent a clearer and more concrete “imagined community”, which is nothing less than an ethnographic expression in the digital age. In this field, although users have the freedom to express their personal emotions—they can laugh and scold in their own video works—there is no doubt that individual emotions receive collective emotional calls from countries, nations, ethnic groups, and regions.

The ardent and deep feelings of family and country, the self-confidence and tolerance of national feelings, the heroism of sacrificing one’s life, etc. are once again magnified and highlighted in the short video, like a huge magnetic field, attracting ordinary people to express the emotions of individual freedom subtly and merge into the collective. the sound of. Whether it is from the archaeological excavation of Sanxingdui, showing the long history of civilization of the diverse and integrated Chinese nation, or the ordinary fire hero who saves lives despite the danger, the short video highlights the characters with narrative time and space rhetoric, accumulating strong and fiery emotions strength. For example, in May last year, a 15-second short video on the “CCTV News” account sending off Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice, received 35 million likes and nearly 4.5 million comments. This brings together the gratitude of tens of millions of ordinary people to the “father of hybrid rice”, the mourning for the death of Yuan Longping, and more deeply the love and tribute to the scientists, role models of the times, heroes and other figures represented by Yuan Longping. .

In the era of national video, short videos are not only the records of events, the exploration of daily life, but also the engraving and engraving of emotions. In the short video world, the trickle of individual emotions exists, and will eventually merge into the emotional river of the community, the collective, and the family, and condense into a close “emotional community” in the virtual space.

2014 is regarded as the “first year of short video”. However, in the first few years of the rise of short video, its user base often published works of “brutal bottom stories”. From the perspective of cultural criticism, as the presentation of social “spectacles”, the alienated, bizarre and exaggerated visual symbols created by short videos bring users extremely shocking sensory stimulation. Over time, short videos have become synonymous with inferior content on the Internet.

From the earthy videos at the beginning of the short video, to the professional and high-quality works in planning, scripting and shooting technology in recent years, at the content level, the short video tends to be broader from the “spectacle” display “Landscape” presentation. Guy Debord believed that, in a society where modern production conditions are omnipresent, life itself is presented as a vast accumulation of spectacles. The accumulation of landscapes is more concentrated in short videos in the form of visual culture, because people today need to understand the world through various landscapes rather than real life itself. Regarding the subtle difference between “spectacle” and “landscape”, some scholars believe that the spectacle has the characteristics of rarity and unfamiliarity. With the repetition and dailyization of the landscape, people’s experience of the spectacle will gradually attenuate, and the spectacle will be enriched in the conventional landscape. and cognitive system, become its component. This can explain that the spectacles of bloggers’ eyeballs, such as “vulgar”, “killing Matt” and “LOW”, which were initially labelled, were gradually submerged in short videos, while more diverse and extensive content was produced with vertically segmented Internet content. The pattern is known to the majority of users. In addition, with the standardized management of short video content, themes, forms, etc. by national regulatory forces, the successive introduction of policies and regulations, and the entry of more and more professional media into the blue ocean of short videos, the content of short videos is superficial and vulgar, excessive consumerism, etc. The mixed situation has improved.

On the short video platform, the trend of art sinking is obvious, which has provided assistance to the public’s aesthetic edification and popularization of aesthetic education. For example, “Shanghai Opera 416 Women’s Group” became popular because 5 girls in the same dormitory performed different performances of Lao Dan, Cheng Pai Tsing Yi, Mei Pai Tsing Yi, Xun Pai Hua Dan, and Hua Dan to perform classic drama excerpts and popular ancient songs. The short video In a more intuitive and low-threshold way, popularize the differences between different opera genres and different roles, and achieve the objective effect of popularizing education in traditional drama. Whether it is cover singing of niche operas, or using cucurbit flute, pipa, suona, banhu, matouqin, dulcimer, konghou, shakuhachi and many other types of folk music, it often gets a lot of likes and fans.

The “2021 Short Video User Value Report” shows that the diversification of short video content not only enhances the user’s sense of companionship and spends fragmented time, but also provides a window to explore and understand the world. From the perspective of content type, the demand for short videos of pan-knowledge and pan-life is still strong, and the reasons for users such as “affordable and useful”, “deep and connotative” exceed “interesting and fun” for the first time. The “Knowledge Inclusive Report 2.0 – Research Report on Short Video and Knowledge Dissemination” also pointed out that short video has lowered the threshold for the public to access knowledge, enriched the form of knowledge expression in a vivid form, and made the creation and dissemination of knowledge easier. Convenience, diversified, all-round and high-level demands for knowledge have become an integral part of the growing public demand for a better life. With the development of Internet technology in recent years, the change of content and the improvement of innovation, the local culture in the public cognitive bias such as killing Matt and Kuangdakuku in the short video world has been reduced to a very small part. Pan-culture and sub-culture exist in their own way, and through the ultra-high-speed dissemination of popular culture, they together constitute a “image China” in the 5G era of the Internet.

Short video has become the core content of current Internet life. According to the 49th “Statistical Report on Internet Development in China”, as of December 2021, the number of Internet users in China reached 1.032 billion, of which the number of short video users was 934 million, accounting for 90.5% of the total Internet users in China. For short video users, short video is not only a social way of life, but also constitutes a rich landscape world. People not only participate in this vast video practice as a creative subject, but also passively suffer as an object. The influence of media on people’s cognitive abilities, thinking abilities and emotional patterns. It can be said that with the help of the “acceleration” of the 5G era, short videos based on the new media form of the Internet industry platform constitute a rich new media narrative style and construct a holistic cultural landscape.

Short videos combine languages, symbols, pictures, images, sounds and other codes in a more personalized, randomized, and pop-like collage. Therefore, on the basis of a huge user group and massive data, it can be It is regarded as a kind of flowing mass culture visual log form. In recent years, the constantly updated digital media has made it possible to record a wide range of daily life practices in ultra-large-scale digital records. It contains the collective expression of social creativity, the activation and release of individual creativity, and reflects the interaction between the overall social creativity, public life, and extensive social participation.

A fluid visual journal of popular culture

Based on the typical UGC (User Generated Content) model, short videos are used by Internet users to record all aspects of their lives. Short videos combine languages, symbols, pictures, images, sounds and other codes for a more personalized, randomized, and pop-like collage. Therefore, on the basis of a huge user group and massive data, it can Seen as a fluid form of mass culture visual journaling. In recent years, the constantly updated digital media has made it possible to record a wide range of daily life practices on a large scale. It contains the collective expression of social creativity, the activation and release of individual creativity, and reflects the interactive relationship between the overall creativity of society, public life and extensive social participation.

Although Benjamin’s criticism of reproducible art in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is widely known, in fact, Benjamin’s other meaning is often overlooked: although the cultural products produced by reproduction technology have lost their uniqueness, they are “all things are The equal way gives the copied object a realistic dynamism”. In the late 1990s, Nicola Negroponte predicted in “Digital Survival” that the fundamental feature of the post-information age is personalization, “the individual is not buried in the universal, or as a demographic Subset, what the development of cyberspace seeks is to give ordinary people the opportunity to express their needs and hopes.” Peng Lan, a communication researcher, believes that the rise of short video image expression has a revolutionary change, and its birth is a subversive On the other hand, the “New Culture Movement” presents the power of novelty and wildness from the folk, the bottom and the fringes, infiltrating the rich life background, and showing a more open and diverse social life.

In the era of short videos, users can enjoy the great rivers and mountains from all over the country, Internet celebrities or niche people, and understand the details of daily life in different cultural units and different ethnic areas without leaving home. For example, the short video blogger “Ajing” is rooted in the rural town of Guangxi with karst landforms, and draws materials from authentic rural life, completes contrasting costumes, and inspires the public to reflect on the beauty of the rural world from a modern aesthetic perspective; travel bloggers ” “Fang Qi” combines the beautiful scenery of heaven and earth, the insights of life in different moods, and the golden sentences and quotations with an average length of three or four minutes. The audience can not only enjoy the beautiful scenery of the mountains and rivers, but also feel the language Brings comfort to the soul. Niche local operas such as Guizhou Nuo Opera and Anhui Lu Opera have also received more attention in the short video media, giving off new vitality.

In addition to daily expressions such as “seven things to open the door, firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea”, daily life themes such as the change of seasonal solar terms, the presentation of local scenery, and the transformation of labor scenes are also the core of the short video content. In recent years, with the popularity of Li Ziqi, Ding Zhen, etc., under the encouragement of the platform’s traffic support mechanism, a large number of short video bloggers focusing on immersive rural life have emerged. become the carrier of their daily life. The rural family life of “Sister Taozi in Shuzhong” shows a strong local color, Sichuan dialect with Zigong accent, a series of typical Sichuan home-cooked dishes such as Bobo chicken and Mala Tang, as well as killing pigs to sell meat, and raking the ground to grow buds. , dig sweet potatoes to make jelly and other particularly real and down-to-earth agricultural presentations, attracting a large number of users to watch and interact.

With the help of Douyin’s(Chinese ticktok) “New Farmer Plan”, “Classmate Zhang”, who became popular, showed the simple and simple life of a bachelor in the northeast countryside from a first perspective, which triggered a wave of collective memories and spoofs; “Shan Village Xiaojie” in his hometown In the quaint villages in southern Fujian, traditional skills are presented with ancient methods, such as traditional food production, iron farming tools, bamboo rafts, waterwheel construction, and even the renovation of ancient villages. At the same time, grand narrative themes such as family and country feelings, heroism, poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, new rural construction, technological rejuvenation, and non-genetic inheritance have become important themes in the creation and production of short videos. The above themes are related to present their understanding of grand and simple emotions from a detailed, personal, and life-like perspective.

All in all, a large number of related topics are presented in the short video field, and because of the diversity and richness far beyond the text and audio carriers, they constitute a “non-archival” visual log of popular culture, and daily life in popular aesthetics is also Presentations are elevated to new interpretive contexts. It can be said that short video, as a new type of image dissemination carrier and social and cultural landscape, is shining brightly at the moment.