【Cultural Analysis】
In May of this year, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Implementation Plan for Rural Construction Actions", proposing to promote the deep integration of digital technology with rural production and life, and continue to carry out digital village pilots.
Rural-themed short videos once became a traffic hotspot due to their unique audio-visual experience, symbolic emotional connections, and short, flat and fast dissemination.
But at present, the growth rate of fans of the popular accounts in the past has slowed down as a whole, and both content production and development models have encountered bottlenecks.
Many people sighed that short videos on rural themes became popular and cool quickly.
The simple, soothing, and poetic rural life embodies many people's feelings of resisting the anxiety of modernity, and the combination of "fireworks" and "new farm tools" has accelerated the digital migration of rural life, and not only achieved a group of "new farmers' creations" It also drives the innovation of rural business models and helps rural revitalization to move towards a newer and higher development stage.
However, the development of rural short videos has also exposed some problems that cannot be ignored.
The rural image in the short video deviates from the real and objective under the "filter".
This includes not only some We-media’s homogeneous, entertaining, and even vulgar and unpleasant inferior content, which deepens the stereotype of rural backwardness and poverty, but also includes some Internet celebrities pulling rural life away from the land and over-packaging.
Internet communication has the characteristics of "decentralization". Although the rural areas constructed by short video media cannot be completely equal to reality, creators should fully understand that personal subjective communication and the objective promotion of rural cultural construction are dual factors for the transmission of local culture, which cannot be partial waste.
The "poetry and distance" or "world fireworks" in the lens are only a certain aspect of the rich picture of the countryside. To express it in multiple ways and present it accurately, it is necessary to have a deep experience and insight into the rural reality and its cultural core.
The rural image in the short video has blurred the reality of rural culture and rural construction under the influence of "short and smooth".
Local culture is the sum of material civilization, spiritual civilization and ecological civilization that originated and accumulated in a specific area with strong local flavor.
However, while rural-themed short videos are "seen" in one place and one corner, many creators either use images as a tool to record daily life, or imitate the route of realizing the traffic of mature Internet celebrities, resulting in most short videos "only only Look at the present but not history, only see individuals but not policies, only show results without discussing the process, only focus on appearances and not culture.”
As pointed out by experts, the themes that are not presented in the short videos are the major neglected issues in rural development.
The Internet has repeatedly verified that there is a lack of products that focus on the subject and blindly cultivate the audience's inert thinking. The accumulation of "homogeneous" will only quickly lead to "low-quality" carnival, and ultimately leave a place for trivial content and negative development. ecological closed loop.
The rural image in the short video ignores the exchange and mutual learning between urban and rural areas in the excessive consumption of "self-presentation".
The popularity of rural short videos is inseparable from the background of the times: in the current rapid urbanization process, if the local culture is not effectively disseminated and further enriched, it will inevitably cause many farmers to be unable to find a sense of belonging in rural life.
With the help of platform attributes and technological empowerment, short videos have opened up a digital channel for urban-rural dialogue, allowing urban and rural residents to form an interactive relationship of "watching and exhibiting", providing the possibility to construct a rural cultural landscape with a new era flavor.
However, as the phenomenon of homogenization becomes more and more serious, the countryside is no longer a place of "living" with unique charm, but is moving closer to labeling, and even deliberately caters to the public's stereotype of the countryside.
What is worth thinking about is that if the rural image in the media is no different from the audience's imagination, the audience's interest will drop off a cliff, communication will cease to exist, and traffic will be unsustainable.
On the contrary, short videos about rural themes should reach empathy from individuality, and see "we" in "I". An example of how the difference" has found widespread resonance.
With the support of national policies, it has become a reality to fully explore the potential of the Internet and informatization in rural revitalization, and to solidly promote the in-depth development of online poverty alleviation.
We need more up-and-coming short videos and "creators of new farmers", and we need more patience and reminders for them, so that new media can truly inject vitality into rural revitalization, so that more people can understand the charm and beauty of the vast countryside. potential, promote rural development, and help rural revitalization.
(Author: Lv Fan, Director of the Audio and Video Office of the Center for Rong Media, Peking University)