Is online subculture the elegant culture of marginalized youth?

On April 20, 1994, China realized a full-featured connection with the Internet, thus opening the Internet era. For more than 20 years, the Internet has profoundly changed the lives of Chinese and has become an important driving force for the development of the national economy. With the development of the mobile Internet, a distinctive youth subculture has developed in the cyberspace with a relative sense of overhead and separation, and its style and performance have undergone significant changes compared with social life and traditional culture, and it has developed together with the traditional cultural order between conflict and coexistence.

Lower identity levels as a protection mechanism

In Culture and Everyday Life, David Inglis argues that the habitual characteristics of each class derive from the social conditions of each class, classifying everyday behavior determined by "nature" as the product of cultural phenomena, and that social hierarchies are culturally embedded in the body and, in part, through the secular behavior of the body as social power, profoundly influencing the way of spending each ordinary day. His views are somewhat reproduced in Pierre Bourdieu's view of physical skills based on social class, but they still show the importance of social conditions as a guide to habits.

Some time ago, the widely disseminated short video "Adult collapse only needs one moment" on the Internet caused many resonances. For the youth group, the imprint of campus life has not completely faded, and in social life, it is necessary to face the greater pressure from work, family and other aspects, while the young people in the initial stage of their careers are in a relatively low status level in life, and it is easy to fall into self-doubt and negative emotions on the verge of collapse in the face of reality. No one can live well in a state of extreme uncertainty and insecurity, and for a single individual, the larger the crowd, the more lonely and isolated they feel. In the face of many others with different circumstances, individuals must increasingly retreat into themselves in order to resist the gap between themselves and the social conditions of others, like ostriches and snails, by shielding everything to learn how to deal with the many problems of social life. In cyberspace, the pursuit of "lying flat" and self-deprecating as "waste firewood" are all self-deprecating behaviors that put themselves in a relatively low identity level, so as to obtain a moment of relief and relief, which has become the norm of many young people's lives. Through instant catharsis and release, even in real social life, it still faces difficulties, at least for a moment. When this moment is transmitted through the Network, young people in the same identity rank are easy to have identity and empathy experience, and to a certain extent, the Internet becomes a "shelter" for a moment to escape from reality, and also becomes an ideal space for emotional release. When there is a large gap between their own identity level and the pressure they face, properly sinking the identity level is conducive to their own emotional thoughts and actual situations, and become an important protection mechanism for psychological defense.

In the early years of the Chinese Internet, the Killing Matt group was a highly controversial existence, compared to the more disciplined group after being indoctrinated and disciplined, colorful long hair, strange accessories, exaggerated and colorful makeup, not only aesthetically different, but also culturally different. Louis Althusser pointed out in his essay "On young Marx": "In order to understand the development of a thought, it is necessary to understand at the same time in thought the ideological environment in which it was born and developed, and it is necessary to reveal the inner whole of this thought, that is, the general problem of thought. "Observing the killing of Matt group, not only limited to its representation, but should be placed in the process of social development in the urban and rural rupture of the environment, as the small-town youth who kill Matt, from the moment of birth, have been placed in the social operation mechanism, under the regulation of the usual way of solving problems in society, in addition to its criticism, we should see the background color under the colorful long hair, they have the same confusion, expectation and restlessness in adolescence, but in this way expressed. For the sociologist Joel Chanon, social inequality is not the only cause of social suffering, but it occupies an important place in explaining it. These inequalities stem from the social model itself and are thus an intrinsic part of the society in which we live. The social model teaches and strengthens social culture in many ways, making it a very important conservative force, just as many people are indoctrinated from childhood that "as long as they are willing to work hard, they can climb to the top", people have been educated in the process of socialization, and they have also accepted their positioning in social life. However, in small towns and villages where indoctrination is relatively absent, when small-town youth encounter a gap in the network space of socialization, they rarely find that there is a place where they can refuse to accept the positioning given, which becomes an important window for the dissemination of individual emotions. Although many young people who kill Matt have received the discipline of social life such as entering the factory to work after growing up, they have completed the stylized cultural expression in the process of growing up.

Marxist cultural theory holds that the analysis of texts and practices must take into account the historical conditions under which they are produced. Some argue that the corresponding consumption process and the historical conditions of acceptance should also be examined. With the development of society, the comprehensive victory of poverty alleviation, the completion of a well-off society as scheduled, the living standards of small towns and villages have been significantly improved, and the appearance and appearance of small town youth on the Internet have undergone tremendous changes, and the killing matt group, as an important fragment in the development process, should leave a mark on the cultural history of cyberspace.

Mass revelry and mutual recognition of identity in cyberspace

Confined to the discipline of social morality, in addition to major issues such as "successful Olympic bid" and "Chinese men's football team entering the World Cup", relatively niche issues are difficult to express emotions in the real public space in a fierce way such as shouting and roaring, before the EDG championship fans took to the street to celebrate, it triggered a discussion of whether to "disturb the people", so the network has become an ideal space for shouting and roaring, the expression can be exaggerated enough, the grammar does not need to be standardized, as long as it does not violate laws and regulations or violate morality, it can be allowed. This carnival full of national honor includes simple patriotic feelings, and also includes the release of youth subculture into the mainstream context due to national honor.

E-sports has always been associated with negative labels such as "Internet addiction", on the one hand, in the impact of cases and consequences of addicted games on the perception of the public, on the other hand, it is related to the distortion of marginal cognition from the mainstream perspective of society. In fact, e-sports and playing games have a great difference, e-sports has become a competition item in the Hangzhou Asian Games, and its competitive nature has been further confirmed. On the other hand, there have been e-sports clubs that have invited game enthusiasts to participate in the experience camp, and many students have "withdrawn from the camp" in the middle, which is also more separated from the game. The EDG victory not only triggered a carnival of fans, but also attracted the attention of some mainstream media, or can be seen as a social life. In Jacques Lacan's view, we are in a state of "scarcity" from the day we are born, and everyone has spent their whole life trying to overcome this situation, tirelessly looking for the moment of "fullness". The relatively pluralistic values of cyberspace provide space for the release of repressed emotions in social life, alleviate self-anxiety, social anxiety and social pressure in social life, and can directly abandon identity and only interact and form identity because of a simple single topic, and produce "fullness" in a moment or a short time. Before the official lifting of the control of the passage from Han to Hubei, the People's Daily WeChat public account launched a creative interactive product "Today, Clockwork WeChat lights up Wuhan", users click on the poster picture, you can change the wuhan landmark building picture from black and white to color, to achieve the effect of "lighting up Wuhan", becoming a popular media product that brushes the screen. This kind of effective connection between news dissemination and user emotions at important nodes enables users to have a strong emotional resonance in the process of participating in the interaction, realizing a high degree of unity in technological innovation, content dissemination and audience participation, and users participate in the central issue through fingertip clicks, breaking the boundaries of reality time and space, obtaining a synchronic presence experience, forming a feeling of being with the people of Wuhan, and releasing the emotions that have been suppressed for a long time due to the epidemic.

There is a group of "Exam Failures Hanging Down and Comforting Each Other" group created in February 2019 on Douban, and its introduction has a warm words of "Many times it is not that we are not working hard enough, but we lack a little exam luck". Here, some netizens share their experience of failing the exam to seek comfort, and some netizens talk about the anxiety of facing the exam, through the space of the "tree hole" form, more space is given to the dark side of the netizens' psychology, creating a relatively controllable "junkyard" for negative emotions, giving netizens the opportunity to discard it, and creatively transforming it, holding back those who are about to give up on themselves because of difficulties. It has been argued that animals may not only fight, flee, or respond to stress failure in the face of stress, but may also unite with each other. In social life, people like or dislike others based on their own value judgments, and the same is true in cyberspace. When difficulties and gaps are encountered in social life or social relations, "hugging" is carried out in cyberspace, and associations are concluded between individuals from different social backgrounds, forming a form of organic unity of community. People have different preferences because they have different social lives, and when they encounter others with the same preferences or situations, they are more likely to have positive interactions. When individuals face difficulties, by finding individuals in the same situation, it not only helps to alleviate negative emotions to a certain extent, but also helps people in the same predicament to form a group organization with common interests and self-awareness, and generates mutual help behavior within the group, strengthening the unity and unity between internal members. This feeling is transmitted to the individual, which will produce a positive sense of power, and cyberspace provides greater convenience for finding individuals in the same situation and doing a good job in negative emotional transformation.

To obscure the established cultural order

In traditional societal perspectives, people would think that some cultures are "better" than others. It is true that the habitual characteristics of the various classes are derived from the social conditions of the various classes, and in Pierre Bourdieu's view, the concept of "leisure" and "elegance" is more likely to arise for those who are relatively rich in "culture" and "economy", while the habits of more classes facing the urgent problem of survival refer more to the "taste of necessities", that is, based on "simple reality" and "straightforwardness".

We should gradually realize that this view is somewhat too intense to express the individual as a pure product of the established class culture, but especially in the current cyberspace, as more ambiguous cultural products are created, there is no absolute boundary between high culture and mass culture, and the Shanghai Rainbow Indoor Choir is a good example of the popularity of the Shanghai Rainbow Chamber Choir on the Internet. Its original "Zhang Shichao, Where Did You Put the Key to My House", presenting every moment of social life in the form of elegant culture in the traditional sense, and expressing the content of "simple and real" and "straightforward" in the form of "leisure" and "elegance", which is difficult to distinguish between elegant culture or mass culture, which has a certain impact on the established cultural order. From the traditional point of view, chorus belongs to the category of the art world, generally by people defined as artists around the professional knowledge and skills organized to engage in elegant cultural activities, and the "readers" who receive cultural activities also have a certain level of art appreciation. In Paul Dimaggio's view, groups in different positions in the cultural industry rank art based on different principles. Artists sought to control the development of their own and others' prestige through the use of "professional hierarchies", such as victorian novelists who wanted to distinguish high-cultural fiction as an art form from popular fiction written by women. But it should be clear that the human regulatory elements contained in the established cultural order are not so powerful in the current cyberspace. Generally speaking, cultural objects are usually self-righteous, and sometimes their content is extremely rich but it is difficult to interpret, but in cyberspace, whether it is a world-renowned master or a graduate of an art school, it is necessary to accept the examination of netizens based on their own conditions and judgment ability, and the judgment and dissemination obtained by cyberspace are of course related to the level of art, but also related to the individual preferences of netizens. For "Zhang Shichao, where did you put my house key", there is no need to talk about music theory knowledge and lyric creation, as long as a simple "good sound" and "interesting" is enough. For the members of the choir, the original deep-seated expectations of the "professional" status of choral practitioners have also been dissolved by the fact that they are presented in a different way, becoming a rebellion against the high professionalism of the art world.

Jurgen Habermas argues that the social world of everyday life—the world of living—has been obscured by "systems." John Hall and Mary Nitz interpret this in Culture: A Sociological Perspective, arguing that this change arose in part because the systematic rationalization of social life invaded the living world, and our lives were increasingly organized through bureaucratic systems of government and the enterprise systems that produced goods, services, and information, which affected the environment, the characteristics of cities, our food, the way we obtained health, and the way we treated disease. That is to say, the sphere of daily life has been increasingly organized by external "systems", and the provisions of technology, social forces, etc. have formed a provision for the cultural order. The emergence of the Shanghai Rainbow Chamber Choir, etc., is separated from the established meaning and the system of things, and there is a cultural phenomenon that is difficult to call order without a strong sense of power, removing the specific display places, cultural monitors, readers, etc. contained in the traditional high-end cultural world, and more importantly, the elegance and popularity have produced cultural confusion, or the boundaries are more intertwined than in the past.

Build another Tower of Babel in the middle of the vast desert

Compared with the cultural order formed by the actual factors and relations related to money, power, status and other practical factors and relations in social life, in cyberspace, even if it is difficult to determine whether a new cultural style has been created, at least there is a clear difference with the traditional cultural style, which can be said to be created in a completely new field, and can also be seen as the flourishing of culture.

The "ghost animal" video that is popular on bilibili, AcFun and other video websites is a prominent representative of this. At the beginning of its birth, it is more to "mock" the "serious", and has a strong relationship with the original text, with the development of this style, many producers began to stitch together the material with their own cultural stance, getting rid of the meaning of the original text, becoming a new cultural creation. The "ghost animal" video appears in the form of decoding, and it also contains the process of encoding. The video producer deconstructs the language concepts and social concepts under the "orthodox" culture by decoding, and behind the exaggerated external effect is the reflection of young people on the cultural order and the expression of their own values. As Dick Herberdiger argues, its subcultural style is aesthetically as noise, caused by social differences or cultural differences between the coder and decoder, while its origins are spawned by the cultural and class differences that exist between subcultural groups and mainstream cultures. The production and transmission of discourse can both strengthen power and undermine and debunk power, and at the beginning of the appearance of the "ghost animal" video, it is more obvious that it is transmitted as an aesthetic of noise. For the grassroots culture as an aesthetic of noise, the way of thinking, understanding, and evaluating is as "creative" as the high culture, and it has the same "artistic beauty". Although the "ghost animal" video is based on traditional film and television works or news reports, through the editor's editing, most of them are completely unable to express the original meaning of their materials, but have become a clear carrier for producers to express their own meaning.

Similar to the "ghost animal" video, as an important part of online chat, emojis are different from the expression of text when chatting, expressing emotions, emotions and attitudes, the production and use of emojis are decoding and encoding processes. Many of the scenes and characters produced by memes are taken from movies, TV series, cartoons, news reports, etc., but the original meaning of the image is dissolved, re-encoded according to the producer's own ideographic needs, and its meaning is nested on the original image, forming a mixture of works, which is sometimes even the opposite of the original meaning of the image. The "meme" is the password contained in the meme and is also a necessary condition for "correct" decoding. Whether or not to "correctly" understand the connotation of emojis, that is, "stems", is an important criterion for mutual recognition in cyberspace, and only by virtue of the use and exchange of emojis, it can be confirmed whether it is "their own people", and thus produce group identity, which can give friendship and a certain sense of security. The understanding of memes is generally easier to exhaust their meaning, and less related to the cultural significance of symbols, conventions, and aesthetics that are socially understood and appreciated. Memes are obviously expressing themselves in this way through style, rebelling against uniform cognition to show their true selves, claiming that I am who I am, rather than the work I do or the role i play. Although it may be "only" a trivial member in social life, it is a producer of meaning in cyberspace. Through the production of meaning in the style of style, the personality of the producer is saved and becomes an important tool for self-expression. Through the use of memes, the individual consciousness of many individuals is stimulated and liberated, so that the audience is also filled with the feeling of "I am different from the world", which is summarized in modern terms as "personality".

It is true that under the higher standard of examination, there are certain limitations in the youth subculture of cyberspace, but when we see its shortcomings, we should fully consider the growth environment, social status, economic strength and other factors of the youth group behind its characterization. As Georg Zimmer puts it, even the most ordinary, inconspicuous forms of life are expressions of a more universal social and cultural order. At the same time, the positive values of patriotism, upward mobility and hard work revealed in it cannot be ignored, and if they are given reasonable positive guidance, it will become a feasible path to lead young people to grow into talents and contribute to society.