Today, people use "focus" to refer to the main force of current cultural consumption. "Focus" or "audience segmentation" is originally a market behavior in which merchants finely divide consumers and place specific goods. However, in the era of symbol consumption + big data, "Focus" not only means the refined delivery of physical goods, but also means the refined delivery of information and information environment: a "hot" event that has set off millions of people to read and discuss, and changing a platform, even if it is only the same platform to switch accounts, may also "check this case". So, Focus here is not just a niche consumer who wants a particular product, but also a literal "divided mass": people live in very different information environments and do not share cognition, events or common sense. Under this premise, cultural phenomena only have "circle-breaking degrees" and not "popularity".
Breaking the circle means that there is a "circle" first; without popularity, it means that there is no force outside the "circle" that can gather people. This involves discussing the fundamental question of the "multitude": How are people classified? In order to adapt to these classifications, what kind of individuals does society need?
To further discuss this situation, we can take a long detour and first observe the world setting in a piece of online literature:
It's a world of strange infectious diseases: negative psychological states (greed, sadness, despair, etc.) are contagious and spread everywhere. Infected people have a chance to become spirit monsters. When the number of infected people increases and becomes uncontrollable, outbreaks break out. During the pandemic, infected people are immersed in collective emotions, losing their independent physical boundaries and blending in with others. Thus, a huge spiritual monster, a spiritual monster with thousands of human limbs and organs as raw materials, was born, and it snowballed and grew larger and larger. It is violent, disorderly, has the power to destroy everything...
"From the Red Moon"
This image is from the popular work "From the Red Moon" by the starting point Chinese Network (Montenegrin Old Ghost, 2020-). The novel describes the horrific scene of human mental problems becoming contagious, and mental infectious diseases figuratively becoming monsters. As a result, various types of "spiritual pollution" appear in the text, strange chains of infection, individual psychological problems falling into the abyss of the collective unconscious... These settings have a strong "post-epidemic" color, highlighting the current human society, a human society where the virus is raging and enters an "exceptional state" at any time, but is "networked" by economic globalization and Internet technology.
I think that the spiritual monster of organ fusion is providing a vivid metaphor for thinking about the "focus" mentioned above. To interpret this image, we must pay attention to the following question: "how is the focus" "divided"? Why is it psychological? And how to manifest as an organ fusion, irrational monster?
Let's cut to this problem with the help of a commercially widespread word ,"user portrait." "User Portrait", also known as "User Role", is a tool to outline the target user, contact the user's appeal and design direction. This concept can be traced back to Alan Cooper, the developer of the programming language Visual Basic. He first proposed the concept of "personas" in "Mentally Ill Managing Mental Hospitals: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Get Back to Sanity" (1999). The "role" here is not a user image outlined through market research, but a fiction entirely from the product designer. If you want to design a suitcase that precisely targets the audience, people will invent a "Francine", she is a flight attendant, distributing drinks on the plane, flying 3 times a day, with a delicate face... The designer then designs the product for this virtual character.
In terms of market performance, virtual characters can be better than the results of the survey. Because virtual characters are not disturbed by the "unconscious": people may hide, misunderstand, and answer questions when facing questionnaires, but fictional characters will not; people may not be able to say what they want, but the desires of fictional characters are extremely clear. In other words, designers are using the novelist's imagination to find potential desires that have not yet been satisfied by the mass market.
In today's era of big data, depicting "user portraits" no longer depends on the imagination of designers, because the unconscious is "manifested" to a certain extent by big data. Big data can not only record a person's clear gender, identity, and hobbies, but also record "unconscious" preferences and emotions: staying on a page for a longer time, watching a short video repeatedly, inadvertently mentioning things... The various traces left by people on the Internet directly become raw data. Algorithms are all accepted, categorized, and labeled when needed. Product managers perform some kind of "interpretation" of the algorithm's conclusions, such as reorganizing labels, dividing different "granularity" and so on.
This implies that economic activity can bypass "people" and directly target (capture, classify, reproduce) desires. If big data has eyes, then what it sees must not be a specific person, but a large cluster of flowing label clouds - this is a direct image of Focus. If the way of classifying people in mass society, such as gender, age, region, ethnicity, income, etc., is based on certain laws (such as ethnicity, geography, economic life, etc.), trying to position the individual in a larger community (such as region, country), this positioning provides the individual with a relatively stable ideology (sense of value), and the focus is not this kind of thing at all - the division of the crowd according to hobbies, desires, and emotional tendencies has nothing to do with any higher community, only about the individual's feelings. Desire and psychology. But these things are difficult to extract a fixed standard, just as real users can't tell their desires. In this sense, big data is not a rational machine, it is just rapidly accumulating "samples" of people and then "empirically" classifying them. This will surely lead to fluid, fickle classifications.
What the focus needs is precisely the person who can adapt to the arbitrariness and contingency of "division". But the "people" here are not so much rational atomized individuals as they are massive slices of "people" in cyberspace that appear, succumb to irrationality, and emotion. These slices are captured by the algorithm and converted into labels.
This is the divided man. Each slice is real. In the age of social media, a person can have multiple virtual identities (IDs) that, like costumes, offer different identities and roles. The "self" has the ability to play the role of the plural and exists in the space of the plural. At this point, each individual is confronted with the ultimate question of "where is the real me?" Either the "I" is a combination of different avatars and is a schizophrenic, or the "I" is inherently multifaceted, but it only shows different aspects in different situations, and space splits. Either way of imagining, the individual goes from "indivisible" to "dividual."
"ID" makes people "aware" of this separability, but big data hides this separability — it allows people to live in a self-centered information cocoon. The "self-centeredness" here does not lead to narcissism, because narcissism occurs in the imagination of comparison with others, but leads to absolute loneliness, that is, a world without others and only the self, which can only confirm the existence of others through emotional and immediate expressions such as "likes" and "bullet screens". As a result, people are more likely to form psychological unions, but reason is not the content of this union.
We can delve into this problem with the help of the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "organs". According to them, "organs," as opposed to "bodies," are organized components; "bodies" are constantly trying to break free from bondage, referring only to the intensity of confrontational behavior. It's a little hard to understand, but imagine that people often use the thumb sliding screen when playing with mobile phones, and the thumb has to work like this, it becomes more accustomed to sliding screens, sometimes even inflammatory, which is an organ that is "capitalized". Similarly, limbs that adapt to production and become too flexible, hypertrophic, or strained are also organs. The body, on the other hand, is not bound by these tissues. Just as the market does not need real people, only "demand", capitalism does not need a body, it only needs specific, fat organs.
From this point of view, the "dividuals" that can be divided in the era of big data can no longer be confirmed as subjects, and can only exist as organs of a bunch of desires. Because sexual desire, preferences, addictive factors, etc. can be included in the production and consumption of the link, into the operation of the entire system. At this time, it is not difficult to speculate that the individual has no importance to the algorithm, and what has weight is something smaller than the individual that is constantly desired and constantly entered into the symbol consumption.
In this sense, "focus" is more of a fusion of organs than the gathering of individuals. The "crowd" has always been considered an irrational, physical being, devoid of shape and difficult to define, the scattered "multitude" is a "rabble", and the violent and disorderly "multitude" is a "Leviathan". In the classic parable, the masses are compared to the headless Leviathan, and ideology gives it a head. Along this line of thought, Focus not only has no head, but there is nothing that can give it a head. It is the fusion monster described in the novel of the random patchwork of limbs and the flesh of the ghost Sensen, unpredictable and unfixed image - because it is originally composed of irrational factors such as feelings and desires.
It can be said that this online text allegorically writes the "points" of the focus, metaphorically comparing the arbitrariness and unfoundedness of the current classification. When people are captured by specific desires, based on "labels", unconsciously divided together, watching the same short videos, enjoying the same music, being recommended for similar products... When the fingers are scattered and organized into different desire spaces at the moment of the finger sliding, the "multitude" loses its boundaries and limits. "Focus" is like the mass corpse: you make the arm, I do the leg, he does the nails, and even becomes a bunch of cells with blurred boundaries... These pieces of corpse cannot be put back together as "Volkswagen" because there is no longer a head position. If they are forcibly combined, they can only fuse with each other into terrible monsters that bring destruction. How to deal with this situation is a test of human imagination.