Recently, micro-short dramas have become a dark horse in the film and television market.
What is surprising is not only the true and false business legends such as "8 days of income over 100 million", but also the fact that the main focus of such micro-short dramas is nothing more than "rebirth and revenge", "rich family grievances", "domineering sweet pets", "marriage before love" and other old-fashioned bloody stories.
The crudeness of the content, the enthusiasm of the ratings, and the stark contrast seem to confirm once again: contemporary people's fragmented entertainment demand is strong, and they prefer to obtain sensory refreshment and psychological pleasure in a simple and direct way.
However, what will be the impact of indulging in these "industrial saccharin" and "digital pickles"?If you think about it carefully, I'm afraid it won't be able to laugh it off.
1) Today is a "fast era", people read news, take express trains, receive express delivery, even in the pleasure of body and mind, the pursuit of those within reach, immediately desirable ways of happiness. The "empathetic" mobile phone fully caters to the needs of users, and constantly feeds "happy fast food".
To read, you don't have to go word by word, someone will help you "get a knowledge point in 1 minute" and "read a book in 5 minutes";Watching the drama, you don't have to keep an episode down, someone will help you mix the highlight lines and highlight moments;On the Internet, the hyperlinks that keep jumping seem to open a kaleidoscope, and you can choose from star lace, parents' short, and young games.
The emergence and popularity of micro-short dramas is a product of this trend. "3 minutes to divorce a good marriage, 4 minutes to get a domineering president, 5 minutes to hold a wedding", the double-speed plot achieves the climax at the beginning, from beginning to end.
There is a "melon seed effect" in psychology: when you pick up the first melon seed, you will unconsciously pick up the second and third melon seeds, and when you come back to your senses, it is already a pile of melon seed shells. Instant gratification can cause a person to quickly produce dopamine, which brings a sense of "top" pleasure, and in order to continue this pleasure, the intensive stimulation cannot be stopped.
All of the above are essentially "happy melon seeds", which make people instantly satisfied and unstoppable. The mobile phone that integrates it into one has become such a powerful magnet, causing everyone to lower their "noble heads" and turn into "screen slaves" in the continuous finger swiping.
2) Wang Xiaobo said in "The Joy of Thinking", "Although knowledge can bring happiness, if it is compressed into a pill and poured into it, the fun will be lost." ”
The happiness brought by strong stimulation is direct and violent, but it also saves the process of exploration, which makes it difficult for people to experience the long pleasure of peeling off the hard shell and harvesting the core of thought. Eating too much such "fast food" will inevitably make people suffer from some kind of "disease of the times":
Decreased endurance. Xi to the "** three seconds" opening screen crit, the narration has become boring, thinking about the aftertaste has become tiring, and many people no longer have the patience to read the foreshadowing and interlocking logic of the grass snake gray line. Even in some complex and controversial matters, I don't want to fully understand and prudently verify them, but I don't want to know everything at a glance and half-understand.
Lack of concentration. According to the "2022 National Attention Insight Report", the continuous concentration time of contemporary people has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds. A person faces the screen at least 150 times a day, an average of 6Look at your phone every 5 minutes. When time is constantly cut, many people's concentration is "not as good as a goldfish".
Lack of expressiveness. Daily communication emojis and popular memes are easy to come by, but when it comes to the moment when logic is rigorous and words are beautifully expressed, it is difficult to speak. What is even more terrifying is that a large number of "people with word aphasia" once "spoke English, memorized ancient poems, and solved equations". The general disappearance of ink in the belly has made "being able to write has become a privilege for a few ** and writers." ”
If you keep less, you will be solid, and if you are specialized, you will be strong. Under the intertwining effect of all these diseases, many people fall into a kind of "blind" rush - often the real meaning has not yet been constructed in the mind, the fingers have already slid unconsciously, and the eyes are hurrying to the next destination. In the end, it seems that I have seen a lot, but I have little understanding, and even less has the growth of precipitated thoughts.
3) Humans pride themselves on "domesticating" smart devices, but it turns out that technology is also "reversely domesticating" humans.
Throughout the history of communication development, from "lead and fire", to "light and electricity", and then to "data and network", the growth and maturity of each media technology will have an impact on the cultural traditions, social concepts, and behavioral Xi of the historical period to a certain extent, and then trigger changes in human lifestyles.
The smart devices represented by mobile phones follow the universality, but they also show a kind of particularity - they meet people's needs like never before, and penetrate into people's lives pervasively. This greatly contributes to human inertia, which makes people reluctant to use their own initiative easily, and prefers to switch to technology. Over time, some primitive instincts faded away.
According to a study, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than the average person because they have spent four years memorizing every street in the city, and they need to memorize far more routes than the average person. But once drivers are Xi blindly following the instructions of the satellite navigation system, the brain is rarely exercised and stimulated in the process.
This case is consistent with the conclusion reached by scientists in their research on "neuroplasticity": human nerves are plastic. When we use a medium heavily and indulge in a cultural phenomenon, we will be "reversely domesticated" by it. Once detached from the support of this media technology, people who have hidden their instincts will feel at a loss. At the same time, such people already have a completely different brain, and the characteristics of the medium become the template for their thoughts.
On the other hand, people carnival in fragmented information and indulge in superficial pleasures, and this consumption preference continues to exacerbate the content industry's bad money to drive out good money, blindly catering to the user's preferences of fragmented content, squeezing the production space of high-quality content, making the content disseminated by the media become a "vassal of entertainment";This way of thinking continues to create a rabble that loses the ability to think independently, only following the emotions and not the truth when encountering things, and rushing to the next carnival party to find the next target after stirring up the ** field into a miasma.
4) Just as the first industrial revolution gave birth to the proletariat in the cities, the emergence of artificial intelligence will create a new class, that is, the 'useless class'. Yuval Harari, author of A Brief History of the Future, was blunt in a speech.
Coincidentally, Kenichi Ohmae mentioned in "A Low-IQ Society" that Japan's new generation is gradually entering a "low-IQ society". The books they read became more and more naïve, they did not think about all kinds ......of rumors, they got by, and they had no fighting spirit
Over the past few thousand years, human technological and physiological progress has been largely synchronized, but this law seems to be malfunctioning today. In the world of traffic construction, human intelligence is abandoning systematic thinking by itself, and instead indulging in and satisfying fragmentation, relying on independent, rational, and in-depth thinking to build a social culture that is in danger of declineHowever, with the support of powerful computing power, artificial intelligence trains complex deep thinking with massive fragmented corpus and builds artificial neural networks that imitate humans.
From "AlphaGo", which defeated the Go world champion, to the current chatbot ChatGPT, artificial intelligence surprises the world every few years. More importantly, ChatGPT's ability to grow independently fully proves that a large model with a high level of structural complexity and a large number of parameters can achieve deep learning Xi.
Some scientists have even begun to develop emotional robots that can think like humans, foster trusting relationships, and have even given a precise timeline for the emergence of truly emotionally aware robots by 2049.
As the observer puts it, "two trends are taking place between man-made and natural life: man-made things behave more and more like living beings, and living things become more and more engineered." "Isn't it worth worrying and being vigilant that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are going on opposite paths?
5) Pascal pointed out that man is nothing but a reed, the most fragile thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. All of our dignity lies in our thoughts.
The inspiration, enthusiasm and imagination that bloom when the human stars shine are the characteristics of human thinking that belong to human beings, and they are also the most difficult thinking abilities of artificial intelligence to obtain. As a product of human thought, artificial intelligence proves the greatness of human beings, and we cannot be smart but mistaken by smart.
A science fiction writer said, "No species can destroy our spiritual world unless we give it up ourselves." This sentence may be used as a warning for human beings to constantly introspect and self-motivate themselves in the world of science and technology. Protecting humanity's invaluable ability to learn, Xi think, and innovate is to save humanity itself.
Although the current generation cannot go back to the "slow past" era without the Internet, it is completely possible to consciously hedge the negative impact of the Internet. This ability to overcome the inertia of the mind and resist the outside world is the strength of human beings.
I often poke my head out of the jumping, fragmentary, and glittering digital world, to read a good book, write an article, and appreciate a movie, so as to rehabilitate my degraded thinking skills. This is perhaps the most dignified way to live in the digital space.
*: Beijing**Client Commentator: Cui Wenjia.