This article is from WeChat official account:The marketing revelation of empty hunting (ID: xunkong2005)< / span> , author: look for empty 2009, the original title: “short video has changed the way we think? ——A brief history of entertainment to death”, source of head picture: “Twenty Do Not Confused”

Short videos are increasingly becoming the most important tool for contemporary people to kill time and even obtain information. The “2020 China Network Audiovisual Development Research Report” released by the China Network Audiovisual Program Service Association last year showed that the average Chinese person used 110 minutes of short video in a single day.

This number makes me feel a little uneasy. If a person spends this time for reading, he can read at least dozens of books a year, and if he is used to watch movies, he can watch 300 to 400 movies a year, but it’s true As a result, he has nothing but a bunch of fragmented images.

Neil Bozeman must have never imagined that this world has evolved into a medium that is more entertaining to death than television.

Neil Bozeman’s concern about the influence of the media on people is the most well-known in contemporary times, but it is not the only one. Humans have never stopped worrying about the evolution of media in history.

Socrates used to worry about books as much as short videos

Xu Zhiyuan asked Zhang Dada at the Tucao conference: If Aristotle walked into Plato’s room and said the sentence, “I love my teacher, but I love the truth more, then how many people are in the room?”

For Socrates, it doesn’t matter how many people are in the room. What’s important is that he doesn’t want this sentence of his apprentice Plato to appear in the book.

If Socrates comes to the contemporary era, he may greatly appreciate contemporary video and live broadcast technology. As a philosopher who is good at debating, he may shine in “Wonderful Flowers” and become a leader in station B. A knowledgeable UP master whose popularity surpasses Luo Xiang, but he will definitely not collect his recorded videos into a book like Luo Xiang, because he is hostile to this medium from beginning to end.

As we all know, Socrates did not publish a book in his life. His things were all sorted out by his disciple Plato.

Havelock believes that Socrates’ Greece was transitioning from a spoken language civilization to a textual civilization. If we compare it to today, it is probably a transition period from the era of literal media to video media.

Socrates’ criticism of writing shows his distrust of the paper medium, but this is not because the writing of paper makes people superficial, but because of the “absence” of this medium. That is to say, the above-mentioned silence, inability to respond, may cause misunderstandings, and weaken people’s memory. Socrates worried that its negative factors would prevent humans from obtaining accurate information, which would affect their cognition of things and the way people think.

During the transition period of the media, Socrates’ reaction was extremely normal. It was just his incompatibility with the new medium of writing. If the medium of paper had dominated the mainstream at that time, Socrates would certainly not refuse others to turn his dictation into words, even if he was not good at writing. In fact, after Plato organized his dialogue into words, Socrates’ thoughts began to enlighten more people in the form of books.

Entertainment to death, the biggest worry of videoization

When we talk about “the medium is an extension of man”, we must mention McLuhan. In fact, this concept was first proposed by Freud, who gave this point of view a stronger Tragic color. He believes that every medium is to make up for a certain shortcoming of people, and to fill the gap between us and the gods. The telephone extends our ears and enables us to hear the voices of distant relatives. Photography and phonograph technology replace our memories.

McLuhan elaborated this concept systematically. He wrote: “The’content’ of the medium is like the juicy and juicy beef in the hands of a thief, and its purpose is to distract the watchdogs in the field of thought.”

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It is impossible for the human species to achieve direct exchange of ideas.They always depend on the medium, so “the medium is the information”, the medium of the same generation is different, and the information is also different. For example, the same is “The Wandering Earth”. People who read the book watch its worldview, plot and literary talent, and those who watch movies watch its visual effects and actors. Those who watch the short video “The Wandering Earth in 3 Minutes” watch it. Introduction and ending.

Three completely different media bring three completely different messages. The depth and value of the three are naturally different. Nowadays, people who watch movies, people who watch short videos, and people who read books are three completely different types of people. Their perceptions and attitudes towards the same thing are also different.

McLuhan believes that technological advancements have changed the symbolic environment—that is, the world of socially constructed, sensory meaning, which in turn can affect human cognition, experience, attitudes and behaviors.

We repeatedly use a medium until it becomes an extension of ourselves, and it changes us. Because each medium emphasizes different senses and cultivates different habits, repeated use of a medium will make our senses conditionally receive only certain specific stimuli, and ignore other stimuli. Just as the blind will develop exceptionally sensitive hearing, society will also change due to the dominant media of the times.

If McLuhan believes that different media will change the way humans think, then Neil Bozeman believes more radically that the impact of video-based media on human cognition is completely negative.

In 1985, Neil Bozeman published the book “Entertainment to Death”. In the book, he believed that television caused the lack of serious public dialogue, and that the video medium would make people lose the ability to think rationally, and therefore be very important to society as a whole. Harmful. He said:

From Erasmus in the 16th century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the 20th century, almost every scholar who has explored the influence of reading on mental habits has come to the conclusion that the reading process can promote Rational thinking, the orderly arrangement of typefaces and the characteristics of logical propositions, can cultivate “the ability to analyze and manage knowledge.” Reading text means to follow a line of thought, which requires readers to have considerable categorization, reasoning, and judgment skills.

He took seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as examples to illustrate the peak of human speculative ability in the writing age and the value obtained under this speculative ability.

Lincoln and Douglas not only prepared the speech in advance, but also wrote the retort against their opponents in advance. Even in the impromptu debate, the sentence structure, sentence length, and rhetoric used by the two of them did not deviate from the written language model. Of course, there are also purely spoken words in their speeches, after all, neither of them can be indifferent to the emotions of the audience. However, the influence of printing is everywhere, with arguments and counter-arguments, demands and counter-requests, criticism of related texts, and criticism of opponents in every possible way. All in all, the debate between Lincoln and Douglas is like an article copied from a book.

To put it simply, the speeches and debates at that time were quotations, very written and serious, and the audience must have sufficient knowledge. A pleasing speech and debate is a fruitful for everyone.

Video-oriented things often bring temporary hahaha. A few years ago, a “Stealer Guevara” who stole an electric car went viral on the Internet. This was largely due to the video media: Thief Guevara had a relaxed expression and a slightly magical accent when he was arrested. , The same beard as Che Guevara, coupled with his golden sentence, these together created Zhou’s popularity in the Internet celebrity.

If Stealing Guevara is placed in the paper media era, at most there will be media reports that “Mou Zhou was arrested for stealing a battery car, claiming that “work is impossible to work””, this kind of text is impossible to become popular.

If Neil Bozeman survives to this day, the medium of short video may shock him, and the harm it brings more than television may make him even more worried. Nowadays, watching TV does not require any in-depth thinking, and watching short videos does not need to be “brained” at all. In the long run, people will become more and more “headless”.

Is psychic communication the end of human media?

In the final analysis, the media is to show human thoughts in the most appropriate way. If humans can directly communicate through thoughts, perhaps the existence of media is not necessary. The dream of humans communicating away from media has always existed since ancient times.Deduction, then the role of logic may become weaker and weaker.

Therefore, the reflection of human thinking and cognition under the change of media has never stopped and will not stop.

In 1956, psychiatrist Milllu complained to television. He said: “Interpersonal communication and discussion have a kind of interoperability, which can inspire freedom. But the pictures on the TV screen cannot produce such interoperability. Dialogue has already Become a lost art.”

The reflection on dialogue as the “lost art” began with Socrates, and today we are reflecting on the fact that short videos have gradually turned words into the “lost art”.

The Sapir-Wolf hypothesis once pointed out that the language structure of culture shapes people’s thinking and behavior. In short, language determines thinking.

This hypothesis is not so much a science as it is a concern. If the video medium changes the way we know things, then in the long run, perhaps reading and writing long articles may become a rare ability. Become a lost, classical art.

Reference materials

John Durham Peters “Speaking to Empty Words: A History of Ideas in Communication”

Em Griffin “First Understanding Communication”

Neil Bozeman “Entertainment To Death”

McLuhan “Understanding the Media”

This article is from WeChat official account:The marketing revelation of empty hunting (ID: xunkong2005)< / span> , author: look for empty 2009