WJ.21: Short Videos in a Fast-Paced Era

This article is a record and reflection on life in April 2023.

🚀 Short Videos in a Fast-Paced Era#

I have a LogSeq whiteboard for weekly topic selection. When I find that the materials for a certain topic are almost ready, I take it out to write and share, which also serves as a summary of the topic. When I write a title, I cross off a topic on the whiteboard, keeping the remaining topics stored at around five.

The topic of short videos has been lying on my selection whiteboard for over half a year. Every time I want to write about it for the weekly publication, I find that my preparation is still insufficient, making it complicated to write, so I keep postponing it, leaving it in the corner of the whiteboard. The reason I decided to write about it this time is mainly due to some recent news and the commercialization of Bilibili, which has given me some thoughts that I want to share.

The Dispersal of Attention: Speed Playback, Three-Minute Movies, TikTok Hits#

Since the advent of the mobile internet era, we are almost constantly receiving new information, with various trending topics, headlines, and hot pushes flooding our eyes. At the same time, everyone has choices, leading to a scattering of information directions. After this accumulation of stimuli over time, our attention has become increasingly hyperactive. As time goes by, the time people can concentrate is getting shorter and shorter; attention is easily lost and hard to capture. We are increasingly dissatisfied with slow, narrative-driven content and information, instead hoping to gain more fresh stimuli in a shorter time. Thus, a product extremely suited to this era has emerged: speed playback.

Personally, I really dislike speed playback. I believe that audio-visual series should present the stories that directors and screenwriters want to tell us, which are highly condensed content products of images and sounds. They compress the creator's reflections on life, their imaginations of an ideal world, and other information into a few hours of footage, requiring the audience to appreciate it slowly. The sound effects, beats, rhythms, changes in expressions, and dramatic tension all rely on the only real thing that can transcend the screen— the flow of time— allowing the audience to feel the story on screen as accurately as possible.

For example, in "Interstellar," the main characters explore the high-gravity planet Miller, where the background music is interspersed with the ticking of a stopwatch, suggesting that time on Miller's planet passes slowly— one hour equals seven years on Earth— thus creating a sense of urgency for the characters to race against time. There are many other examples, but I won't elaborate here. If a film needs to be watched at speed, it may indicate that its information capacity is insufficient or that it is not exciting or profound enough, making it unnecessary to watch.

However, in the realm of short videos, there is an even more extreme presentation of fast pace— the three-minute movie.

Three-minute movie explanations are neither movies nor explanations; they are more like highly purified dopamine injected into your body through your eyes, allowing you to enjoy the thrill of consuming excessive information in a short time, at the cost of slowly losing the ability to empathize with characters, losing patience to appreciate light and shadow, music, and ultimately degrading the hard-earned ability to watch films. —“Xiao Shuai and Xiao Mei,” Destroying Movies in Three Minutes | Ifanr

In this three-minute electronic pickle, exquisite shot designs are stripped away, leaving only curious images to capture the audience's attention; the dramatic background music is replaced with upbeat dance tracks, stimulating you to continuously secrete adrenaline to enhance your focus; the tension-filled plot changes are reduced to abrupt curiosities. Everything serves our eyes, making the information density extremely high and the duration as short as possible, with AI's dialogue rhythm accelerated, fearing that you might leave in the next second.

And we seem to really like this system because it can always capture our weak attention, preventing it from easily dispersing, keeping us hooked, scrolling down like we're enchanted, thus stealing our time.

In addition to movies and series, the music field is also not spared from this grip.

When it comes to play counts, Jay Chou's songs might not even compare to the TikTok hits that easily break a billion views. The fundamental difference between popular songs today, like TikTok hits, and past popular golden songs is that music is no longer aesthetically oriented but has become user behavior-oriented. TikTok hits have a mature mass production line, from capturing trends, composing, to recording and going online, the entire process only takes a day, with each link meticulously calculated through big data to ensure that every beat hits the user's pleasure points.

In a peer-reviewed journal in the field of music psychology, Musicae Scientiae, a study from 2017 analyzed 303 American Top 10 singles from 1986 to 2015, finding that in the 1980s, song intros generally exceeded 20 seconds, but now they have shrunk to under 10 seconds. The average length of a song has dropped from 4 minutes and 10 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds, with the average length of the 2021 American Top 50 songs being even shorter, at just 3 minutes and 7 seconds, with 38% of songs even being less than 3 minutes. This indicates that people's attention spans are getting shorter; if they cannot quickly hear the exciting parts, they become impatient and stop listening.

Recently, I have been enjoying Tanya Chua's "Darwin," which has a 28-second intro and a song length of 4 minutes and 25 seconds. The classic "Love Before the Year 2000" is memorable, as music producer Chen Jikun said, its intro can be remembered for a lifetime. However, many current arrangements start with a flurry of sounds because attracting users to listen to a whole song has become difficult; just having a 15-second catchy segment can lead to a hit— for example, "Loving You at 105 Degrees," which gets stuck in your head after one listen, like a melody that feels like a virus in your brain, but after a while, you remember nothing unless you listen again.

What we should do is to slow down, be more patient, pull our attention back from the rapidly changing outside world, not be attracted by the explosion of external information, and focus more on our inner selves, on our feelings each day, the tactile sensations of our actions, and the feedback, thoughts, and experiences from each review.

Cultural Carnival in a Fast-Paced Era: Pandas, Zibo, Toxic Chicken Soup#

According to Bakhtin's understanding of carnival, it can be divided into the following four categories:

People can freely and intimately touch each other during the carnival;
A playful way of interacting;
An equal and intimate attitude towards life;
Coarseness, meaning a down-to-earth lifestyle.

In addition, carnival has two major external characteristics: universality and rituality. According to Bakhtin's carnival theory, short videos actually belong to a type of cultural carnival.

A typical example is the unusual attention to pandas across the internet recently. I used to like looking at panda pictures simply because they are cute (especially the neckless Hua Hua), but after the news of sending Xiang Xiang off from Japan went viral, the direction of panda-related communication and attention became strange, which I won't elaborate on here.

Another example is the suddenly popular Zibo barbecue. Many media commentary articles in communication studies analyze why Zibo suddenly became popular and whether this heat can form a pattern and be replicated. For instance, this article from Quanmei titled “Zibo Barbecue: Short Video Deification, Social Media Recommendations, and the Internet Sensation of a Popular City” discusses two points— the "internet sensation" and "presence" of short videos.

The visibility of short videos: presenting scenes with rich details, having visual impact, and even bringing filters, special effects, and other rhetorical devices. However, maintaining such strong impact and spectacular visuals is quite challenging, necessitating a shift into the "Deification 2.0" phase, transitioning from sensory, carnival, and entertainment experiences to a process of meaning production.

The discussion related to internet sensation is as follows:

The so-called "internet sensation" refers to the cognitive habits and expressions established based on the information dissemination and connection methods of internet culture. "Internet sensation" means that the thoughts and ideas of internet users receive attention, reflected in fragmented, entertaining, and youthful content qualities, with certain plot highlights and emotional pain points, and strong user participation and experience.

Short videos possess both visibility and connectivity, making the creation of "presence" one of their strengths, "thus creating an immersive experience, to some extent retaining user attention and time. In a fragmented, content-heavy media ecosystem, enhancing the audience's contextual experience is key to improving dissemination power." (Source: same as above)

The popularity of "toxic chicken soup" also confirms the reliability of the "presence" theory. If we view it from a god's perspective, we can easily discern that the absurd stories in "toxic chicken soup," like a daughter-in-law hitting a mother-in-law, are fictional. However, when scrolling through videos, we often immerse ourselves in them, even believing them to be true— this is the effect of "presence."

Compared to text, short videos, through character performances and restorations, more easily create a sense of "presence." This experience feels as if we are there, participating in a family quarrel or a friendship collapse, combined with exaggerated language, dramatic character actions, and expressions, the surreal simulacrum state makes many users enjoy watching more and more, unable to stop.

Neil Postman once said: "Modern technology has fundamentally changed people's attitudes toward information; in the past, people searched for information to solve problems in life, but now they create problems to make useless information useful."

"Toxic chicken soup" blindly pursues the absurd and even anti-common sense, creating bizarre problems to attract attention. This novelty not only attracts people but also has a huge impact on their cognition.

Due to the generalization of short video dissemination subjects and the interaction between senders and receivers, these carnival phenomena have been jointly promoted, while the carnival itself weakens and dissolves people's understanding of serious issues.

Therefore, I want to discuss the dangerous game that modern people are playing in relation to the current state of Bilibili.

The Dangerous Game of Modern People: Deconstructing the Sacred, Obsessing Over Phenomena#

Recently, I noticed the incident of Bilibili UP owners stopping updates, and Mu Yu Shui Xin made a response—

“Next, we will produce more and more programs. While not giving up on deepening long videos, we will expand more program formats and think about and try more commercial possibilities.

‘Down to earth, seriously creating content’ should not become a tragic story but should be a story of ‘standing firm and living more abundantly.’

I often think, in this era, being able to produce such works and interact with such good audiences, isn’t that the most fortunate thing?”

So I looked into Bilibili's commercialization model and the analysis of short video strategies. I won't elaborate on the issues of the Huohuo platform, advertising revenue, and differences in user demographics, as they are not the focus of this article. Relevant materials are listed in the appendix for those interested to explore. Here, I want to focus on the sadness of serious long video UP owners being gradually eliminated in this era.

Currently, whether in long videos or short videos, whether in articles or marketing activities, topics that can hit the audience's explosive points ultimately serve traffic dissemination, which can be categorized into three types:

Topics that trigger public anxiety, such as money, poverty, gender relations, learning, work, etc., like discussing the difficulties of job hunting for fresh graduates, waves of layoffs, sharing side jobs, and farming in the countryside.
Directly hitting social hotspots, expressing righteous indignation, with obvious emotional rendering and catering to curiosity, such as Yaya, Tuofu, etc.
Topics that make the audience feel a sense of superiority, like various flattering tests on NetEase Cloud.

Let’s take a moment to reflect: do we really need this kind of content? We learn knowledge not to generate traffic to highlight superiority, nor to attract clicks through deception, but to convey knowledge.

The more attention is scattered in this restless era, the more we need excellent creators to break the wall with quality content, to calm down and create content that provides a sense of companionship; the more the culture of despair prevails, the more we need bright and passionate moments to pierce through the gray mist and gloom of the times.

Undeniably, modern social life has become rich and colorful. Modern people indulge in fast-food consumption culture without guilt. They do not need to think about essence; they only believe in phenomena because they see through that essence is merely an illusion fabricated by humans. Modern people are too clear-headed; the philosophical Sphinx's riddle can no longer confuse them because they do not need to ponder those bizarre things. To live and to be happy— this is the secret of modern life.

But is this really "happiness"?

Short videos, various entertainment games and activities— this happiness does not require thought, comes very easily, but also easily leads to loss. We strive to seek happiness, yet happiness seems to have become fast food, lacking something.

Short videos allow us to briefly immerse ourselves in low-level happiness, forgetting our despondent selves who do not want to strive, creating a false sense of fulfillment, but ultimately only bringing more emptiness and unease. That enduring happiness, which requires difficult efforts to attain, cannot be replaced by these things.

Today, humanity is engaged in a dangerous game— abandoning all things sacred and essential, feeling that nothing is noble, deconstructing the sacred, mocking depth, elevating self-awareness and present feelings to an extreme degree. Phenomenology and existentialism are rampant, advocating for the abandonment of all essence or profound things, following feelings, and enjoying life to the fullest in the present.

In fact, when we abandon essence and chase phenomena, when we think we have become smarter, we have already embarked on a path from humanity to animality.

References and Further Reading:

🎬 This Month's Books and Media#

Reading: Philosophy | "Lectures on Western Philosophy" (Zhao Lin) | ★★★★★ (5.0)
Reading: Philosophy | "Philosophy and Life" (Fu Peirong) | ★★★★☆ (3.5)
Reading: Cultural Education | "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" | ★★★★☆ (3.5)
Reading: Cultural Education | "The Selfish Gene" | ★★★☆☆ (3.0)
Watching: Anime | "Demon Slayer: Swordsmith Village Arc" | ★★★★★
Rewatching: British Drama | "Sherlock" | ★★★★★
Rewatching: Movie | "Buried" | ★★★★★
Finished: Movie | "The Wandering Earth 2" | ★★★☆☆
Finished: Movie | "The King of the Sky" | ★★★☆☆

I read less this month and need to make up for it next month. By the way, I highly recommend Zhao Lin's "Lectures on Western Philosophy," which rekindled the genuine love for philosophy I felt when I studied the textbook he co-authored with Deng Xiaomang during my graduate entrance exam preparation. This is the philosophy truly worth engaging with. I haven't been watching dramas or playing games lately, partly because I haven't found any good shows, and partly because my schedule has been disrupted, with many knowledge areas needing supplementation during this critical project period.

This month, I took a GPI test, showing a strong desire for success (9.8/10), and my emotional regulation also met expectations at a high 9.8 (after all, being stuck in traffic for 9 hours during the May Day holiday still kept me calm, haha). My scores for critical thinking and organization were also high, but my sociability and adaptability scores were only a bit over one point, needing improvement in the future.

Having passed through a spring-like April, I look forward to being able to enjoy "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" next month~