The boundaries of information have been broken, but the invisible “wall” has never disappeared.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “drugs” (ID: youhaoxifilm ), author He Runzhen, Jiang Yuqi.
At 8 in the morning, the tired Xiong Er walked out from Shenzhen Foxconn Guanlan Science and Technology Park and returned to his home just 260 meters away from the park. When he was just working night shift, the first thing he did was not to sleep, but to send a short video that was made before to the volcano video. On top of that, he has 40,000 fans and is one of the heads of the Foxconn area.
For the media, the word “Foxconn” is very meaningful.
Nine years ago, Foxconn broke the building continuously. In just ten months, 14 Foxconn employees jumped upstairs from different parks, making this traditional manufacturing factory a mediator. “.
Southern Weekend reporter spent 28 days undercover Foxconn, trying to find the truth of Foxconn’s continuous jumping from the fragmented interpersonal relationship; in 2013, “Financial World” published a “Foxconn’s “Nightlife””, visiting Guanlan, Longhua, Zhengzhou and other places, but was renamed as “Foxconn women workers part-time in the sex industry” by the online media, causing protests from the Foxconn Trade Union Confederation.
On May 26, 2010, Foxconn opened its doors to more than 200 news media around the world for the first time due to frequent employee turnover. The picture shows the Foxconn Longhua Science and Technology Park on May 26th. (Source: Xinhuanet)
After ten years later, with the retreat of these hot discussions, Foxconn is slowly returning to “silence.” Occasionally I can see some traces in the online community that knows about it. For example, a user named “Li Dog” recorded his two-month life at Foxconn. This “no hope” life is letting He worked hard for postgraduate studies, and now he is a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Columbia University. But most of the answers are more like taking the initiative to cater to the public’s imagination: the two lines of black and white in the assembly line, each lasting 10 hours, in addition to overtime to get money, the workers here did not pursue.
The life of Foxconn youth, only boring work?
With questions,
Poison ID (WeChat ID: youhaoxifilm)
Came to Guanlan Foxconn.
We found that, unlike some of the stereotypes described, more than 300,000 individuals here have the same ordinary entertainment life as ordinary people. And some Foxconn employees
With a mastery of hotspots and online culture, I skillfully became a short video queen and earned more money through this skill.
The popularity of the mobile Internet has made online entertainment spread throughout China like two pieces of Coca-Cola.
In such a special area with symbolic meaning, the fast-handers are helping Foxconn youths to “reversely attack”, some gaps are being filled, but there are still some “walls” that have not been broken.
The experience of Xiong Er is just the beginning of a story.
Foxconn behind the “label”
When the car drove down to the high-speed and deep into the Guanlan area of Longhua District, the original high-rise buildings along the road gradually became low-rise buildings, warm colors. The street lights replaced the lights in the commercial center, and no one could see too many pedestrians until 9 pm. Everything around seems to still have the brand of the old industrial era. If you just want to see what you are looking at, you may recognize the labels that are “should” in various reports – closed, backward, isolated, thinking that this is still a decade ago.
Image Source: Southern Weekend Report 2010, the picture in the report is “Workers on Foxconn production line, eyes are sluggish”
Until the second in front of us, the moment when the iPhone XS began to show his video account, the real face here gradually emerged.
“I have several numbers on the volcano video, and there are more than 40,000 fans.” At the beginning of the interview, Xiong Er also showed some restraint. In the face of questions, he only answered two or three words. When I went to the personal short video account, his voice was completely opened: “I have an account on the fast hand and the vibrato, but the fans are not as many as the volcano. So many fans, this one is the most.” “
When asked about his masterpiece, Xiong II showed some pride: “Too much, I don’t know which one to choose.” He showed us hundreds of videos.Most of the content is the daily life of Foxconn employees, such as factory brothers commuting, garden canteen meals. “The amount of playback is quite high, my video is just a click (the amount of playback can be broken).“ He pointed to a video about the new employee entering the factory “You see, there are too many million, this has more than 400,000 playback.”
Xiong II shows his volcanic works for drug lords
Beyond the short video platform, Xiong Er’s true identity is a senior employee of a business group engineering department at Foxconn Guanlan Park. He has been working at Foxconn for ten years. Excluding the rest day of the week, Xiong II stayed in the park for about half a day every working day, and in a few leisure time, short video and short video became his most important pastime.
Among the many Foxconn young people, “severe short video users” like Xiong Er are not a case.
Li Jianyu, who has worked at Foxconn for three years, told us that short video platforms such as fast hands and vibrato have long been one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Foxconn: “Colleagues around me, at noon To brush, go to work on the road and brush.Everyone’s time is cut very hard, watching short videos is the most convenient”.
In the 2018 new conference, Yue Futao, the fast-paced vice president, also revealed that “There are more than 10,000 Foxconn employees“. After a year of sinking and development, Foxconn people who are publishing content on major short video platforms may have far exceeded this number.
Foxconn employees on fast hands and vibrato
But it’s different from the users in other regions who are living or trying to bring goods, including Xiong Er. Many of the interviewed “Foxconn Red” said that the most direct purpose of using short video platforms is to use them. Short videos to spread the recruitment information, so as to earn a lot of introduction fees.
When searching for “Foxconn” on short video platforms such as fast hands and volcano videos, the drug lords found that many users with a large number of fans had the words “recruitment” and “recommendation” in their names. And in their personal introduction, they will alsoWith the words of personal WeChat, telephone and “please contact for job search”, some people even set up multiple QQ groups or conduct live broadcast services to post recruitment information.
Foxconn fans have many recruiters among the top users
This is a unique “business model” that is only available in the Foxconn ecosystem.
According to Foxconn’s regulations, employees who have been introduced to Foxconn after being introduced to the company for more than three months, the introducer can get a bonus. The amount of the reward is generally between 900-1500 yuan, depending on the type of work, the recruitment season. In addition, If the number of referrals retained after 3 months reaches a certain number, the introducer can also get the exclusive incentive bonus of 888 yuan (10-29) and up to 38888 (100 or more). “.
Foxconn recruitment rules
The reason why such a reward mechanism will occur is that the Foxconn production line is highly mobile, and many employees will leave within three months, and they will need to be replaced at any time.
As the second person of Foxconn, Xiong Er, there is already a sense of developing this sideline. In the traditional Internet era, in order to make information effectively sink into various towns and villages, he can only use local Baidu Post Bar. Post information as a position. To this end, Xiong Eryi has been involved in dozens of different townships, but the actual dissemination effect caused by posting is very limited.
But the rise of the short video platform has opened a door for Foxconn employees like him – data from organizations such as the Cool Goose User Research Institute show that among the audiences of popular short video platforms such as fast hands and volcano videos, three or four The proportion of online users tends to reach 60% or more; Everbright Securities’ research report also shows that short video ranks third in the TOP 10 field where the sinking market consumes prominently.
And the young people in these sinking markets are the “target crowds” recruited by Foxconn.
The things that Xiong Er did are no different from those of the Internet companies: LeeUse the outside world for Foxconn’s “hunting”The strange mentality “drainage, the daily life in the packaging plant precipitates users, and finally “purifies” potential job seekers with sleek and neat benefits. The traffic funnel in the Internet world is reproduced here in the most primitive way.
“This is my list of referrals. There are more than 80 people who are still in service. Many of them are related to me through the volcano video. As far as I know, there were many people who got the audience last year. More than 100 rewards.” Xiong Er showed us the small procedures set up by Foxconn for the recruitment rewards. The above will record the status of each employee under the name of the introducer so that the employees can verify the rewards.
Until today, there are still some legends on the Internet that Foxconn V has relied on short video recruitment to enter the million, which has also driven more and more Foxconn employees to join the short team of short video recruitment. According to the information disclosed by Xiong Er, he and his wife, who are also employees of Foxconn (also publishing a short video of recruitment), the annual income sum is expected to reach the average income of a middle-class family in the city, although the distance is 100 There is still a big gap in the 10,000 yuan, but it has already surpassed many ordinary people.
There are some Foxconn Vs circulating on the Internet. Relying on short video recruiting has been a million legend
The upgrade of the recruitment mode is just a face-to-face change of the rapid iteration of the communication environment.
The house rented by Xiong Er is located in the Dashuikeng community in Guanlan, where 90% of the households are Foxconn employees or their families. Judging by the “appearance” alone, many buildings, shops and small county towns in the third- and fourth-tier areas are no different, but under the surface, “there is no hole in the sky”.
View of the large puddle village where Foxconn workers gather
We randomly visited five Internet cafes in Dashuikeng. Several different network administrators said that people who come to Internet cafes to watch TV series and watch variety shows are becoming less and less:< Strong> “Many people have video site members, it is definitely more convenient to watch on mobile phones.“ A female webmaster who is watching variety shows simply says that he will be full of love The annual membership of the art, because the annual subscription is more cost-effective.
At Guanlan, this summer is the most concerned.The high video content is also the “Chen Qing” and the various popular variety shows, and even the young female network manager said that she does not like the hot summer “Dear, love”, she is chasing the popular American drama “Fatal Woman” .
It’s also in the big puddle area, on the fourth floor of a seemingly dilapidated mall, there is a movie theater that is not very easy to find, filled with posters and latest projection equipment.
Although we didn’t have a lot of visitors at the scene at 10:30 in the morning, the data provided by Tuopu think tank pointed out that in the case of other theaters one kilometer away, this theater’s total box office this year. It has exceeded 3 million and can be ranked in the top 5,000 in 11,000 theaters across the country.
This kind of “no sensation”, performed on the younger generation of Foxconn people More obvious. When we first saw Li Jianyu and Liu Lang who had just arrived in Foxconn for a few months, they naturally chatted with us about the popular online red and tiger pliers. Li Jianyu also because of The reporter had a basketball team that shared the support and hit a palm, and Liu Lang said that he would give the anchors a reward when watching the live broadcast, because he felt that “this can help him (she) succeed.”
If you don’t deliberately emphasize the identity of their “Foxconn people”, it seems that it is difficult to equate them with the labels on Foxconn that are portrayed in the media.
“This situation is normal.” Li Jianyu does not think that he is a special case, but his “typical Foxconn” employee in this age group, “My hobby may be better than our production line.” Colleagues are more extensive, but the overall difference is not too big.The Internet is more and more developed, information and channels are open to everyone, and everyone has the opportunity to get it.< Strong>”
The popular rule of “Futurkang”
The drug lord saw the morning of Xiong Er. He had just finished a night shift and sat down in the small park near our home.
The business group where Xiong Er is located will have to perform “turning upside down” every other month. However, no matter how hard the work at night and the tiredness of going home after work, it will not delay Xiong Er’s release of the short video recorded earlier in the morning.
There is a habit of being unable to move, on the one hand, because Xiong Er believes that the morning time is the best time for each platform traffic, the newly released video will be more concerned; on the other hand, if the update is not working His weight on the platform will decrease, resulting inThe work is not recommended for popular.
In order to get more chances for recommendation, and to prevent the video from being advertised as an advertisement, Xiong Er’s account name on some platforms will replace “Foxconn” with “Futurkang”. It is a kind of universally recognized “industry consensus.” “This is also the reason why I don’t really like to use the vibrato.” Xiong Er said, “The vibrato is too strict in this aspect. It is easy to get a job posting information.”
“Futura” is the name of “Foxconn” on some video platform programs or segments
All of the above are the “creation experience” summed up by Xiong Er and the major Foxconn “Net Red” in just over a year of shooting career. In addition to how to fight with the platform, these experiences are more about how to attract the law of heat – What kind of topic is more likely to attract the attention of netizens, what topic should be issued in what time period.
Not long ago, there were rumors that Foxconn would stop doing OEM work for Huawei and sparked hot discussions on the Internet. Xiong Er, who was informed of the incident, quickly released a video of the Foxconn Huawei production line still under construction, and immediately rushed to the popular volcano video, harvesting nearly a million broadcasts. This success made him realize that as long as the words “Huawei”, a popular company, are added to the title, there is a chance to become an explosion.
Whenever the students in the major vocational schools start to work in the summer, during the summer vacation, Xiong Er will bring relevant keywords to publish the content with the theme of “summer recruitment” and “short-term welfare”. Video tends to have a chance to hit the hot spot and get hundreds of thousands of plays.
When there are no hot spots, Foxconn’s “net reds” have to find another way.
Li Chengjie, a native of Dazhou, Sichuan, has two accounts (“Foxconn Licheng Jie” and “Foxconn Lichengjie & Interviewer”), with a total of 191,000 and 46,000 fans. In February of this year, when he was interviewed by another financial media, the total number of fans on the first account was less than 100,000. However, he was not able to take the car model at the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Macau International Auto Show in June this year. In the first half of the year, it has achieved a powder increase of over 100,000. Today, Li Chengjie is already the second-largest player with the words “Foxconn”.
“Car models are more likely to attract the attention of male workers, I plan to reach 25 fans. Start againFoxconn’s content.
Do you like this beauty? “
Although Li Chengjie said that he has no talents and can only do recruitment, in such a region where there are more men and women, he has mastered a kind of speech related to sexual concealment. For example, in the fast hand, when shooting the car model around the T-station, he will match the text: “Choose a collar and pay attention to the floor reflection. “Sometimes he also shoots some big-breasted women, with the words “big mind” – that full-bodied female model happens to have a skeleton on her chest.
One of Li Chengjie’s quick homepages has now been renamed “萱萱车模”
The “female” label seems to have become the key to Foxconn’s short video traffic.
Among the many fast-handed males, “Foxconn Little Cute” is their “competitive product”. When the men shoot beautiful women, the 98-year-old factory girl has its own gender advantage. She took a video of a new employee into the factory and was able to harvest 170,000 broadcasts. Her copywriting is naturally related to gender: “Foxconn’s new colleague, who was just transferred to the factory, was transferred to the office. It is good to be beautiful. Do you think the old irons are right?” Someone commented in the comments: “Which God wants to marry and tell me.”
Foxconn’s cute little homepage
“I will also publish some female workers’ content frequently, with some related topics, which are easier to be noticed.” Xiong Er showed us that he has produced hundreds of thousands of broadcasts called “Finding a Girlfriend.” Short video of digging a wall, but in fact, content does not have much to do with love.
He further explained to us the reasons for “hot spots”: “In fact, many people come to Foxconn, not to find a job, but to fall in love and find a girlfriend.So see Similar content, these people are more willing to come in.“
“Since this kind of content is more likely to get attention, why not cooperate with some well-dressed female workers, specifically to shoot some promotional videos and make the team bigger?” In the interview, the drug lord raised this question to Xiong Er. . Xiong Er’s answer is very dry.Crisp: “I can’t find it, no one wants to cooperate with us. Before I found a tall, handsome boy who was handsome, people were not interested, there were not many girls, and they were not interested.”
The same dilemma, Li Chengjie also encountered. Although they are a group of “play well” fast-handed players, they occasionally communicate in private, but it is almost impossible to cross each other’s videos like a vibrating network red.
“Fans don’t want to share, who is the person who recruits.”
Li Chengjie believes that the root cause of the lack of cooperation is money, and the average distribution is not realistic, because some people have more fans and some have fewer people.
Before, in many media interviews, there has been a mysterious large “24w”, and his fans are currently ranked first in the same type of account. But no matter whether it is the media or Foxconn “net red” circle, no one has seen his true face. Li Chengjie told the drug lord that he had tried to add this “24w” friend, but he was blacked out soon.
Another Mr. Zhang, who has a quick account for Foxconn Headquarters @Interviewer, also expressed his concern for this “24w”. When he made an interview with the drug lord, he immediately said, “Quick 24w fans interviewed. No? You should interview him first.”
Mysterious Queen “24w”
In addition to money, Foxconn’s interpersonal relationship is also an obstacle to the further development of the Queen. Through Li Jianyu’s narrative, we know that in order to improve the lives of workers, Foxconn has added a lot of public activities space in the factory area, such as libraries and cinemas. The dormitory of workers has also changed from the rumored hundred people in the past to the current one. Staff-level staff “eight-person room, “teacher-level staff” four-person room.
But the repetitive work of programming still has the suspicion of “atomic” pipeline workers, such as Liu Lang as a former graduate of mechanical engineering, his current job is to face a simple production line, check 500 daily. Whether the block electronic screen has scratching and damage, such as repeated boring actions.
Under this work background, Liu Lang has not found a familiar friend among colleagues in the same factory. He only paid attention to 13 WeChat subscription numbers, and the only entertainment-related public number is “Sir Movie”, which is because of the strong recommendation of Li Jianyu, a fellow and colleague.
Selected and selected
Short video sinks, Foxconn has a large “net red”, is there a significant difference between their entertainment life and other people in the city? This is the question of drug lord hovering in the heart of the interview..
One of the tenants who are in Shenzhen, rich in entertainment and life, Shao Peter gave his answer: andFoxconn youth, Nanshan Science and Technology Park Tencent’s Internet company employees are all brushing their hands and vibrating, but the latter will have more “options.”
“For Foxconn employees, there is more content in the vibrato than in the past information environment, everyone can choose; but some things, such as surfing, watching the environment and characteristics of Foxconn to restrict this “.”
He simply calculated the cost of a Foxconn youth to see the sea: “There is no subway near Xiaomeisha, it is not possible to squeeze a bus, because there are still many things to stay, one night, the same day. If you go back to the same day, there will be no bus at night. You may have to pay 300 yuan for a round trip. In fact, the cost is not low, but when you come back, you can shake it, there is no pressure, you want to dry up.”
Foxconn factory workshop in short video
In the Foxconn ordinary workers exposed to the drug lords, if there is enough overtime, the three hundred is about one working day’s salary. But this can be easily afforded for ordinary technology company employees. It seems that the mobile Internet has made everyone “equality” for entertainment, but brushing short videos is just one of the few choices Foxconn youth have.
Shao Peter is a otaku, and entertainment is concentrated in games and various hands. In the last five years, he has collected more than 90 console games and several hardware devices, plus more than hundreds of thousands of overheads. In his three-bedroom apartment with a unit price of 100,000 yuan / square meter, a room was even used to put his various “toys” and collections.
In a middle-class community, Shao Peter is actually a different kind: most people go abroad once or twice a year, or do outdoor activities, or buy luxury goods. In this entertainment scorn chain, they like to play games at home and He is obviously in the downstream. But if he wants to choose, he can still sneak up on the chain upstream. “One time I went out and rushed into a wave of friends, and I liked the number of times.” He usually bought the hand. Usually only get a dozen or so.
Perhaps a kind of empathy as a minority, he does not think that brushing faster is lower than traveling abroad: essentially entertainment. Entertainment itself doesn’t really make sense, so there’s no need to distinguish it. This is his experience in attending a painting exhibition some time ago.
“This is life”
Even if you don’t include offline entertainment, Foxconn youths are still at the end of the “long tail” in this short video ecosystem. In the original Foxconn original works that the drug lords are exposed to, the popular soundtracks they use are often not trendy enough. Some even a few months ago, the simulated mirrors are very simple, not like the net red in the first-tier cities. Ingenuity and constant “work”. Li Chengjie once made a short video of a beautiful car model riding a cloud, and the bottom comments were dissatisfied and critical: “You want to be better, big brother.”
It’s not hard to understand. Compared to 24 hours, we are pondering the popular net red. These workers also need to earn money to fill their stomachs in the factory. The Canon G7X, which has one person in the network, is also a low-cost option for them.
This “long tail” effect may prove the classic digital divide theory in communication. The “digital divide” that was born in 1990 explores the differentiation caused by the gap between information and electronic technology. This differentiation exists between different countries, regions, industries and strata. The implication is that technology does not eliminate information inequalities between people, but it will exacerbate these gaps.
“Digital Divide” (Source: Big Data Digest)
Qiao Linchuan, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who studies labor issues in the information age, believes that the basic binary hypothesis of the “digital divide” is not in line with China’s current national conditions,because In the current social class structure in China, not only the middle class, but also those in the middle and lower information class are the main forces driving the total increase of the online media market. He is more willing to call Foxconn youths “the middle and lower information class.”
With the urbanization and industrialization process in China, the widespread use of low- and medium-end information dissemination technologies has given this class some kind of empowerment: for example, they can publish and obtain certain life information through short videos.
In the report of Sanlian Life Weekly, a PhD student at the Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication said that short videos bridge their “use gap.” But Qiu Linchuan also mentioned that this empowerment does not completely change the work.People’s lives, because many of them can only see the interests of individuals or small groups, it is difficult to exceed the constraints such as occupation, gender, geography and other factors.
Short video bridges the “use gap” but does not Revolutionize the lives of workers (Source: Big Data Digest)
This is exactly the same as the drug lord in the Guanlan area: although fast hands and volcanoes provide various subsidies for content creators, there are still a few people who are desperately making money like Xiong Er. Xiong Er said that 2% of people in Foxconn worked very hard, and they started to make Hong Kong purchases. They also sent takeaways to work part-time after work, but 98% of them were “people who took the salary.”
In addition, like Li Chengjie, who have already achieved the head-sized “net red”, they have also encountered development difficulties. Li Chengjie recently discovered that short video recruitment is not a job with a high threshold. After being exposed, it is getting harder and harder. He sometimes walks in the factory, someone will recognize him and say that I am your fan, Li Chengjie will be very happy. But he also knows clearly that he is just a recruiting Foxconn youth, and has nothing to do with those glamorous net red.
The moment he was closest to the fans was in a video that proved his car model was original with a voice recorder. In the video, he said with a pass for the auto show: “Look, this is my ID.” His hand was rarely seen, but the video was only played 4,802 times, far less popular than the models. .
“In addition to creating surplus value on the production line, in addition to being a consumer in Internet cafes and mobile malls, the power they really have, including the right to speak, is still quite limited.”
Qiu Linchuan published the book “World Factory in the Information Age” in 2011. It has been eight years since then. We found that in addition to the increase in short video and live consumption, the above conclusions are still not outdated.
.
This is probably because the mobile Internet itself does not eliminate all kinds of inequality and cultural prejudice – using “Foxconn” as a key word, search for various articles in WeChat, many media mentioned here will use many The hunting event is cut in, and this is not a product of an elite perspective?
In addition to this, this cultural bias sometimes comes even from within Foxconn.
When we chatted with Xiong Er and Liu Lang, we found that although they have become accustomed to short video consumption, they still think that the animated movies in the first-tier cities are not worth one.mention. “For example, the recent “Which is the sea”, I think let me see an animation is really not interested, it is related to interest. For example, the “speed and passion” in the United States, action movies can be.” Liu Lang It is not clear that the box office “close to 5 billion”, in fact, the original name is “Where is the devil of the world”.
And although the interviewees and short videos show us the beautiful corner of Foxconn’s youth life, they also reveal a near-mechanical similarity: open the hands of Li Chengjie, Xiong Er, Zhang and others. The short videos they released are almost exactly the same from the content to the text style. The same crowds, the same dining hall, and the same soundtrack are like some kind of online refraction of the Foxconn assembly line model. The mobile Internet gave them some opportunities, but the “atomicization” mentioned by Qiu Linchuan in the book a few years ago seems to be just a platform to continue alienation.
On the last night of Guanlan, we visited the famous Nighthawk Ice Rink in the media report. It was closed for a short period of time because of the renovation, but everyone knows it. Skating is a classic entertainment culture in the Guanlan factory area. These skating rinks have existed at least 10 years ago in the searchable reports.
Only one comment on the public comment “Night Eagle”
The refurbished Nighthawk has just opened less than a month. It is still a free day for girls on the working day, 10 yuan for boys, and 20 yuan for men and women on weekends. On the bright and fresh skating rink, young men and women put their hands on the shoulders of the front row, spinning around the venue, and using the entertainment of the 1980s to vent the factory-repressed hormones.
A magical contrast is formed here. They are the closest young people to the new iPhone, but they have the kind of nostalgia that Jia Zhangke has in the “Jianghu Children”. In this factory island, with disco once I waved my arm again and again.
With the ups and downs of the music, they sink to the bottom of the sea for a second,In the next second, fly to the sky. Our doubts have not yet been solved, but in this moment of joy, the answer never needs to exist.
(At the request of the respondent, Xiong Er, Shao Peter, Li Jianyu, Liu Lang are all pseudonyms)