This article analyzes the relevant content in live broadcast and short video, and summarizes the image of the town youth into five main types.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Chinese Youth Research” (ID: China-youth-study), author Liu Shengzhi An Ziwei.
Summary: In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile Internet and the sinking of consumption, young people in the town have become the focus of attention. Live broadcast and short video are important cultural and entertainment consumption methods for young people in the town. So how do they present and construct their own images in live broadcasts and short videos? This article analyzes the relevant content in live broadcasts and short videos, and summarizes the image of young towns into five main types: life comfort and satisfaction. The image of the current leisure person; the hard work, the pursuit of the ideal image of the laborer; the image of the exile who is at a loss, the rebellious and self-deprecating; the fashionable and individualized image of the fashionistas; the image of the chivalrous people who maintain the fairness of the rivers and lakes. At the same time, this paper also analyzes the group mentality and social reality of the young people reflected in the image of these young people, and deepens their understanding and understanding of the young people in the town.
Keywords: Youth in the town; live, short video; image analysis
In recent years, the term “town youth” has become a hot topic in society. The reason why this group is valued is directly related to the current sinking trend of consumption in Chinese society.
First of all, in the movie market, the box office champions “War Wolf 2” and “Predecessor 3: Goodbye Predecessor” let people see the tremendous contribution of the young consumer of the town. Later, people found that the town youth also redefine the mobile Internet market – they used “reading” to create interesting headlines, “consumer” to support the fight, and “watching” to bring fire to the fast hand and vibrate, it can be said that the town Young people are paid attention to and valued as a newly emerging market power [1].
However, apart from being a consumer power, what kind of social group is the town youth? What is their lifestyle and mentality? People have different opinions, no one, and even no misunderstanding of the young people in the town. [2].
In fact, according to the theory of constructivism, there is no such thing as a “small town youth” in reality, and “small town youth” as a group identity is defined and constructed as a “signifier”. Related news reports, comments, literary works, film and television dramas, etc. are filled with meaning.
Of course, the construction process of this meaning is dynamic, and there is no shortage of ambiguity and conflict. Such a discourse construction cannot be underestimated, because it can be constructed at the same time to “construct social reality, construct ideas and even construct identity” [3]. Perhaps like the “petty class” [4], “the town youth” will also be a new class that is constructed by discourse and gradually breaks into reality.
Therefore, as the “indicative” of the “small town youth” that is constructed, the participation of the small town youth group in this construction process is very meaningful. This is our understanding of the town. An important dimension that youth should not ignore. As we all know, the new media represented by live broadcast and short video is the main platform for the young people in the town to carry out cultural consumption and cultural production. The new media gave them the space of self-expression and speech, which is also the space of the original “aphasia”. It provides a new stage for reviewing and understanding the cultural performances of young people in the town.
The “Quick & Vibrato User Research Report” released by Penguin Zhikuo in 2018 shows that in the short video app of fast hand and vibrato, only 1% of users in first-tier cities account for about 10%, and users in third- and fourth-tier cities account for 60%. In addition, platform users are mainly young groups, with 66.6% of users under the age of 24 and 75.5% of the platform. [5]. According to a survey by the Fast Data Research Institute, about 230 million young people are active in the fast-hand platform every year. Every year, the young people in the town are releasing 2.8 billion+ videos [6].
It can be seen that live broadcast and short video are not only important entertainment methods for young people in the town, but also a cultural space for young people to express and express themselves. Then, what kind of self-image is presented and constructed in their self-expression? What kind of social mentality and life situation are reflected behind these images? This is the core issue to be discussed in this paper.
This article selects the two most representative live broadcast and short video platforms, namely, fast hand and vibrato. Through the analysis of the live broadcast and short video content released by the young people in the town, combined with interviews with the sample of typical urban young users, Research from the perspective of image presentation and construction to deepen the understanding and understanding of this group. First of all, the town youth referred to in this article refers to young people living between the ages of 18 and 35 living in small towns of the third and fourth line and below.
This article takes a qualitative research and text analysis approach. When selecting samples, the identity of the young people in the town was judged from two aspects: the location and age indicated by the user account, and the environment and plot of the image and video display in the video. Secondly, in order to ensure the representativeness of sample selection, we try to select live and short video users with a large number of fans. The number of fans represents that the content published by these users has been recognized by people. According to observations and interviews, the fans of small town live broadcasts and short video users are mostly similar groups.
In order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the young town users in the live broadcast and short video platform, we first browsed a large number of small town youth user accounts, and based on the contents of the release, we initially combed several typical young town images. And select 8~10 representative samples from each type for further study.
In text analysis, we areThe live broadcast and short video content of the sample users were analyzed and summarized from the aspects of their characters, environment and storyline, as the basic analysis materials for the image of the young people in the town they presented and constructed. In addition, in order to understand the real life and mentality of the young people in the town, we selected about 30 samples for online interviews. After research, we found that the image of the young people in the live broadcast and short video platform is not monolithic, but has different types and characteristics. The following five kinds of main images we combed are analyzed one by one.
I. The image of a casual person who lives comfortably and satisfies the status quo
After analyzing the relevant content of the fast hand and the vibrating platform, it is found that most of the young people in the town present the image of the casual person who enjoys life and satisfies the status quo. First of all, their short videos and live broadcasts recorded a large number of daily leisure life, including self-portraits showing family life, drying food, drying baby, drying pets, etc., including outdoor street performances, square dances, walking teams, etc. There are also weekends such as picnics, self-driving tours, gatherings with friends, participating in collective sports, watching movies, karaoke, and traveling.
For example, the fast-moving user “Shirai Lei” lives in Jiamusi City, Heilongjiang Province, and has published 239 short videos to record his daily life and what he has seen and heard. These include their own wedding, the birth of their son, the scene of a family’s New Year, the grandfather who wrote calligraphy in the park, and the old man who sharpened the knife on the street. The content of these daily life accounts for a large proportion in the live broadcast and short video platforms.
The 2018 Quick Content Report shows that from the perspective of platform content, life content accounts for 28%, ranking first [7]. It should be pointed out that the number of fans who post these content is often not many, most of them only dozens or hundreds. Mainly because these contents are relatively bland and not easy to attract attention and forwarding.
But the interviews found that these publishers still have a choice for the content they post. They record the moments of life that they think are meaningful or the common day that they think is interesting, and believe that shooting and publishing these videos increases their lives. Fun and presence. In addition, there are often comments below the video, publishers will also actively interact with fans, some of them are their real friends, so publishing videos has become a way for them to socialize and show themselves.
In contrast, young people in some characteristic towns tend to showcase their unique local customs on the platform, and often have relatively high views and attention. VibratoMost of the content released by the user “Shaking Your Phoenix” is the local customs of the ancient city of Xiangxi and the daily life of the young town.
In his spare time, he will participate in the dragon dance activities in the ancient city, play the piano, fight, etc., full of the life of the town. The two most praised items in his work are:
The first one is the snow scene of the ancient city of Fenghuang. The text is “This small town is a paradise, and does not accept rebuttals.” The harvest is worth 44,000. Fans sigh the beauty of the ancient city in the comments.
The second article is for the Miao people to use the song as the medium, a pair of men and women to the scene of the mountain songs, and praised 86,000. The fans in the comments were moved by this simple Miao style, and they all said: “Want to go “Phoenix” “Do you still have time to learn to sing?”, full of longing for the fresh and interesting folk life in the distant city.
The content of these live broadcasts, short videos, and interviews with publishers found that the lives of young people in these small towns are relatively comfortable and comfortable, which is consistent with the previous general perception of “small town youth”. . Most of them are between 25 and 35 years old. They have formed their own families and their lives are relatively stable.
Some of them have a good family background, and parents can contribute to their purchases, marriages, job hunting, and child care; some can find better jobs in small cities with their own academic qualifications, such as civil servants; Some have a stable income by virtue of a skill or a small business. Although their income is not high, they are economically more relaxed than the housing prices and consumption levels of small cities.
So, on the whole, on the one hand, they don’t have much material or psychological pressure. On the other hand, their work is mostly nine to five, they don’t need to work overtime, they don’t have to traffic jams and run on the road every day. They have more spare time, energy and mood to enjoy leisure and daily life.
However, due to the relative lack of cultural and recreational facilities in the small city, the living circle and radius are relatively small, and the life itself is relatively dull, so they are more active in displaying live-action, short video recordings to show what they think is meaningful everyday life. . As Goffman puts it in his “self-presentation in daily life”, the self-presentation of the individual in daily life is a purposeful “performance”, “to maintain the impression that the individual creates in front of others”, “Showing the world a better or ideal side of the world” [8]. The display and presentation of the daily life of the casual person is also trying to convey the wonderful side of his ordinary life, in order to manage the impression of others on the self.
Second, hard work, the pursuit of ideal workers image
As mentioned above, on the fast hand and the vibrating platform, the young people in the town who live comfortably and satisfy the status quo account for the majority, but the number of these users is large, but the number of fans is generally small. In contrast, a small number of users are also more representative, although the number of their accounts is generally small, but the number of fans is more. This part of the town youth, their level of education is relatively low, and the work they do is more biased towards manual labor.
So why do their accounts attract more fans? Through the analysis of the live broadcasts and short videos of these small towns, we can find that most of them show a good mental outlook and show hard work. Pursuing the ideal image of the laborer, it is appreciated by the fan community who are also young people in the town.
First of all, unlike the leisure pictures of the first-class towns that like to record daily life, the young people in this kind of town are often very ordinary or even low-key, but they are willing to record their hard work in live broadcasts and short videos. For example, on the fast-hand platform, Xuzhou’s auto mechanic “Qingpao” is 27 years old and has been working for 14 years.
In his live, short video works, almost 90% of the content is in the roadside repair scene, he is wearing a simple and simple T-shirt, oily overalls, but once the car is repaired I concentrated on it, did not fear the dirty, and even used my mouth to clear the blocked oil circuit, drenching the engine with heavy rain. In the video commentary of “Elegant Brother”, fans commented that he “wears the dirtiest clothes and uses the dirtiest hands to make the cleanest money.” His account fans have reached 3.197 million, which shows people’s affirmation of the image of the hard-working town youth.
In addition, some young people in the town will use vibrato and fast hands as a platform to share skills and entrepreneurship. For example, the fast-handed user “Small Town Girl √ [Share Food]” lives in Linyi, Shandong. Her fast-hand account has 268,000 fans. The main content is to share the practice of various home-cooked foods, attracting a large number of fans to gather and learn.
Quick-handed users “hand-made” formerly known as Shuai Shuai, lived in Baoding, worked in a big city in the early years, and transferred to five or six cities in more than 10 years, and worked in more than 10 kinds of jobs. He unintentionally released his own “headless melon” and “knife knife comb” and other “useless good”, and the result was unexpectedly popular. Then he returned to his hometown, making hand-made and live broadcasts, shooting short videos as his own business, currently has 3.2 million fans in fast hands, and received a lot of praise.
It is worth noting that some of the young people in this kind of town will actively display their songs, dances and other specialties, from which we can more intuitively feel their pursuit of life ideals, positive spirit and love of life. . For example, the fast-hand user “Working place brother (He Yuankai)” is 27 years old, in Luzhou, Sichuan.