news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

the sweetness of love bloggers, the touching stories of family bloggers, the adventures of travel bloggers, the daily life of family bloggers... maybe they are all fake?

from the parisian elementary school students who lost their homework at the beginning of the year to the real and fake crabs now, the crowded online celebrity track has produced one "online script" after another, creating the most boring hot topic this year - whether the blogger is acting out the plot has become a rashomon, but netizens have truly felt "deceived". after being fooled again and again, you and i behind the screen have become modern truman.

author | strawberry crisp

editor | su wei

title image | "exciting internet celebrities"

before eating the first crab of autumn, netizens have already cut the first melon of early autumn.

a week ago, a popular blogger with 24 million followers named "northeast rain sister" posted a video of catching crabs in a rice field. netizens questioned the video for containing a lot of unrealistic staged content, saying "crabs are caught at the shore at night," "rice field crabs are not so white," and related topics such as "northeast rain sister is faking" became hot searches on weibo.

three days later, the "northeast rain sister" team responded in a live broadcast, saying that they were invited by the official to shoot the video in order to promote panjin rice field crabs, but because of the designated time of the event and the inconvenience of shooting at night, they chose to pose for the video; and the team was not trying to sell crabs, but to promote their hometown. currently, the video has been removed.

(photo/video blogger @930friends)

"northeast rain sister" was once the rural blogger who could bring the most healing feeling to netizens. with a height of nearly 1.8 meters, she could easily carry half a pig, peel corn in the field, and cook a table of dishes by herself... she was frank and down-to-earth, and she lived up to her reputation as the "wolf warrior version of liziqi."

however, it was only after the two live broadcasts on september 7 that many netizens realized the value of pu shi: the cumulative sales of northeast rain sister’s live broadcast room exceeded 10 million yuan, and it even topped the list of total sales for a time. the topic #has northeast rain sister’s house collapsed?# also became a hot search.

the standards for whether a post has collapsed or not vary. it is hard to say whether the threshold for “post collapse” is too low or whether netizens have more “minefields”.

but what is even more difficult to understand is that it is already 2024, why do viewers who subconsciously know that "99% of short videos are scripted" still find it difficult to accept staged videos?

(photo/《inspiring praise for internet celebrities》)

the distance between posing and faking

for life-oriented video bloggers who focus on "recording life", when every moment of daily life becomes a "life that can be recorded", new problems also arise: the boundary between reality and performance is infinitely blurred. short video bloggers who "turn over" at this critical point can probably line up from here to france.

this year, netizens were particularly sensitive to fake video scripts. the last time they collectively experienced a major rollover was in paris. the internet celebrity "thurman the cat one cup" was banned, and enthusiastic netizens no longer have to "worry" about qin lang not being able to find his winter vacation homework.

in april, the hangzhou police issued a police report that "thurman the cat one cup" planned and fabricated a video of "finding the lost winter vacation homework book of elementary school student qin lang" and maliciously hyped traffic to cause adverse effects, and was given administrative punishment in accordance with the law. after initially posting a video "defense", "thurman the cat one cup" finally admitted to posing and publicly apologized. soon after, her accounts on major platforms across the internet were permanently banned, and her millions of fans were reduced to zero overnight.

many internet kols mentioned a theory when analyzing the "thurman cat one cup" script fraud incident - the red queen hypothesis. the red queen hypothesis originated from a passage from the red queen in alice in wonderland: "if you want to stay where you are, you must run very fast. if you want to break through the status quo, you must run twice as fast as you are now."

short video creators who are deeply trapped in the vortex of traffic are chasing algorithmic data for attention and exposure. creating popular content has changed from a goal to a kpi that must be completed. in the short video track where "involution" is becoming increasingly serious, it is reasonable to expect that the video creation of top internet celebrities cannot be separated from scripts.

even if the script is assumed to exist, marking "this video is purely fictional" to avoid "fake risks" is not the first choice of most short video bloggers. on the internet stage, "honest people" are not really a popular character. internet celebrities, whose success or failure is due to their personality, regard "real" and "living people" as their biggest selling points. as for whether the story plot that paves the way for the personality is true, we can leave it aside.

the audience who are just watching for fun have also figured out a set of rules for "posing" short videos: the storyboards are beautiful and coherent, the dialogues are detailed and appropriate, and the plot logic is complete. as long as it doesn't distract from the drama, these design details are acceptable "artistic processing."

just because the audience can accept something doesn’t mean they will accept it completely.

li ziqi, once the most capable woman in the chinese internet world, has never stopped being questioned for her videos being "staged" and "faked". on may 13, 2017, because her grandmother was injured by malicious comments online, li ziqi announced that she would stop posting videos, and in order to prove her innocence, she made public the entire process of the video shooting for the first time.

one of the images that was suspected of being cutouts. (photo/@李子柒)

in the decentralized short video traffic scenario, the steps required to create a video are no secret - it has to go through many post-production processes such as recording and editing before it can be presented to the audience. bloggers who are recommended by the platform to enter the traffic pool must also continue to update day after day to catch waves of traffic. in order to efficiently and conveniently output popular content, even the simplest plot requires preset stories, scene posing, and effects first.

the "true stories" that are finally presented on the mobile phone screen are all predetermined destinies that the creators have already planned in the script. they are also an unspoken understanding between the audience and bloggers: the only important "authenticity" is the ability to provide emotional value.

the reason why short videos are frequently exposed as fake is probably because they are always stories built around characters. the difference between characters and life is that characters that are not accepted by the audience will fail, while real life never lacks room for ng.

(photo: "nagi's new life")

infinitely close to reality

li houchen, the host of "flip radio", once lamented in a podcast program, "in this day and age, if you spend a lot of time writing something and don't put it somewhere for people to see, it is particularly unbelievable and unimaginable."

digital technology has penetrated the three-dimensional reality infinitely, and individual lives are increasingly exposed to data streams, and the way people record their lives has also changed. the most obvious point is that whether it is writing, shooting or recording, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to record purely for non-utilitarian purposes. we are becoming more and more conscious of editing and are always ready to share with unknown audiences.

we are becoming more and more accustomed to presenting everything about ourselves on the internet - the fragmented life can become the material for jokes in short videos at some point.

(photo/《inspiring praise for internet celebrities》)

this is also the most contradictory aspect of life-oriented videos: on the a side, it has to present a real sense of daily life like a running diary; on the b side, it must have highlights that attract the audience.

the social attributes of short videos themselves essentially determine that videos recording life will not be simple visual diaries. the content presented has been deliberately selected and arranged. it is a "reconstruction" of real life, infinitely pursuing realism, but at the same time cannot be equated with reality.

the vlog that best represents lifestyle videos, the long-discontinued youtube couple blogger @bfvsgf, is one of the earliest vloggers that can be traced on the internet.

jeana and jess, the owners of this dual account, are a couple who have been in love for many years. they insist on using cameras to record their daily life scenes every day, sharing every detail of their daily life with the audience. in may 2016, they released their last vlog, announcing that they would stop updating and end their relationship.

the title of this suspended video is a new chapter. (photo/@bfvsg)

“we only film part of our lives because we only want to spread positive and interesting content, not all the difficulties in life.” “everyone thinks our lives are perfect, but in reality it’s really not like that.”

the constant recording and editing of videos every day put their lives and relationships in crisis, and the two were caught up in a dilemma about reality and performance:

"when vlogging became a job, i began to wonder, am i recording our daily lives because i really love her, or am i just making videos for everyone to watch?"

to this day, this is still a question that every short video creator needs to think about. when personal daily life becomes "video material" to be considered and edited, people unconsciously lose the ability to distinguish and perceive "reality" and "performance".

(photo/artificial intelligence)

yuval noah harari, author of "sapiens: a brief history of humankind", pointed out in his new book "sapiens: above sapiens" that "traffic" is a myth created by algorithms in order to control humans.

social networks are always online because of algorithms. but humans are organic animals that follow organic cycles of day and night, seasons - we are sometimes active, sometimes resting. this is the only fact of life that does not change with the information world.

in 2023, the merriam-webster dictionary's word of the year is "authentic," which means real, reliable, and trustworthy. the spectators who fight fakes in the short video spectacle may also realize that we need to find another way to reshape reality.

the boots will fall to the ground, but you have to walk the road yourself to know it.

image/artificial intelligence