"Enthusiastic social fear", "Rotten Master", "Peppa Pig Social People", "985 Waste"... In the current network context, the internet buzzword of "contradictory expression" has become a true reflection of the ambivalent mentality of some young people. The use of this contradictory rhetoric echoes the psychological activities or living conditions of some young people who deconstruct real life through secondary deconstruction, label self-deprecation, and playful confrontation. So, what are the specific manifestations of the current "contradictory youth"? What is the cause? Let's take a look at the people's forum exclusive article.
Source | People's Forum magazine and People's Forum Network (rmltwz)
Author | Ji Weimin, professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Journalism and Communication of the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, director and researcher of the Research Center for Media Communication and Youth Development of the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and deputy director of the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Contradictory rhetoric usually refers to the rhetorical means of combining completely contradictory and opposing concepts or images, and the new combined words and phrases seem to be contrary to common sense and traditional logic, but they are a realistic reflection of social contradictions. This rhetoric, which originated in ancient Greece in the mid-seventeenth century, means "pointedly foolish" (obviously absurd). The New Oxford English Dictionary explains contradictory rhetoric as " a modifier of two words with completely opposite meanings combined and joined together." It is worth noting that when the two sets of semantic contradictory words are combined, special implied meanings and language tensions will be generated, especially in the current Internet expression, some young people often use this form of network rhetoric, such as "small town to be a problemmaker", etc., to express the confrontation and deconstruction of the contradiction between their own identity and real life, and also show the spiritual healing adjustment exploration of young people trying to dissipate anxiety and gain recognition through personality expression.
What are the manifestations of "conflicted youth"?
Secondary deconstruction of confrontational discourse: deconstructing pain points, and deconstructing the self. When young people carry out "contradictory expression", they often choose words and sentences with hidden connotations, and get rid of the original life trajectory in the "contradictory expression" with the posture of confrontational discourse, so as to deconstruct the conflicts and pain points that exist between their current identity and the real world, and achieve the purpose of self-healing and self-reconciliation. This is a phenomenon worthy of attention.
While using contradictory rhetoric to deconstruct the pain points of life, young people will also secondary deconstruct their own contradictory ideas. For example, "exquisite poverty" reflects the attitude and choice of a small number of young people - "to become poor for the things they like". But at the same time, young people will also see through the false symbols created by consumerism and use confrontational discourse to ironize and deconstruct this phenomenon: for example, in the concept of consumption, irony of "exquisite poverty" with "comparison-type frugality"; irony of "punk health" with "punk health" against "staying up the night with the most expensive skin care products"; in aesthetics, "soil to the extreme is the tide" to "prefer soil to get rid of slag, it is not vulgar"; in the concept of love, to "active single" right" I could be single for the rest of my life, but my CP must be together" to make an irony. Deconstructing the pain points of life is also deconstructing the "deconstructing the pain points of oneself", and this phenomenon of secondary deconstruction truly reflects the complex psychological state of the current youth group of obedience to habits and resistance to authority, avoidance of reality and directly facing contradictions.
Labeled self-categorization: Find peers and enhance group recognition. Stuart Hall, the father of contemporary cultural studies and a professor of British sociology, once proposed: "Identity is fundamentally a subject problem, a relationship reflection and self-affirmation of the subject in a specific social and cultural relationship, a construction and inquiry about self-subjectivity." For the "conflicted youth" group growing up in the era of social networking, the Internet field is the original stage for them to carry out self-awareness, social expression and relationship construction to gain recognition. With the popularity of social software, the overlap of interpersonal relations between network society and real society makes young people often use the way to strengthen their own labels to constantly look for peers with the same or similar experience, for example, many young people are worried about fear of "saying the wrong thing" in real social networking, "don't know what to say" or "too much to reveal the true heart", there is a ambivalence of "want to say but dare not say, can not say", so the "enthusiastic social fear" and other Internet buzzwords that show this psychology should arise from time to time.
"Conflicted youth" are addicted to the efficient convenience and relaxed pleasure of virtual social networking, and "real social fear, online social cattle" and "online carnival, offline widowhood" have become the norm, and often jump and merge between "social ceiling" and "social phobia", and have been given a new label - "social cow miscellaneous disease". Label-like contradictory online buzzwords such as "social cow miscellaneous disease" reflect a common form of rebellion of young people to mainstream society today— creating cultural tribes belonging to their own groups by creating unique language symbols to obtain psychological satisfaction. It is through this kind of stylized exaggeration that young subculture groups realize the sharing of collective problems, thereby constructing identity and obtaining group recognition, including "the confirmation of self-identity and the confirmation of the commonality of other people in the group."
Playful and exaggerated expression: platform viewing, expressing demands. According to the "exhibition/performance" theory put forward by British scholars Abercrombie and Longhurst, when the medium enters people's daily lives and plays the role of self-presentation, people will perform self-performance based on the medium and watch others, in the process, through the expression of words full of performance meaning to show the inner or true or constructive wishes and appeals. The "contradictory expression" of the youth group can also be regarded as a kind of "viewing/performance" with the help of new media on the Internet, accompanied by playful and exaggerated performances, presenting the living conditions of contemporary young people, reflecting their emphasis on self-will in social interactions, and expressing their demands for an ideal life.
For example, in the popular phrase "Peppa Pig Social Person", "Peppa Pig" originally refers to the cute cartoon image of the piglet, which is in stark contrast to the image of the "social person" who is well versed in the world and has eight faces, and the "Peppa Pig" in the innocent world is combined with the "social person" in the mature world, and the contradiction is full of ridicule and helplessness, which is the dissolution and resistance of the young people to the difficult adult laws in a playful way. On the other hand, it can also be seen that young people still have inner appeals for childlike innocence in the face of cruel social reality. Another example is the combination of "ugly disgust" and "cuteness", "soil stagnation" and "rushing tide", which constitutes an "aesthetic contradiction" in which vulgarity and elegance are mixed and beauty and ugliness are integrated. This exaggerated pursuit expresses the fierce tension between aesthetics and ugliness, and takes subversion and deconstruction as an expression of novelty and highlighting individual demands.
Psychological causes of "conflicted youth"
Youth culture: naturally born out of subculture. If you want to explore the causes of the psychological state of "conflicted youth", one topic that cannot be avoided is subculture. Subculture is a cultural way of challenging mainstream culture through style and establishing a special identity of the group, with a sense of "ritual resistance" and an appeal to identity as its hallmark elements. Each era has its own subcultural temperament characteristics of the times, as long as we pay attention to observation, it is not difficult to find traces of the "contradictory youth" group culture from the subculture: the rebellion and resistance presented in youth culture stems from the oppression and balance of the dominant culture on the expression of the personality of the inferior youth group.
As john Fisker, a prominent American scholar of cultural studies, explains subculture: "As the prefix sub indicates, subculture is a meaningful and unique negotiation within a broader culture." They correspond to the special status, ambiguous states and concrete contradictions encountered by certain social groups in the larger structure of society and history. "Subculture breeds an instinctive resistance and differentiation to mainstream culture, and is a marginal culture relative to the "center", and the famous American contemporary cultural critic and theorist Dick Herberdiger believes that any subcultural style is a realistic response to social inequality. Resistance, marginalization, and stylization are the three characteristics that identify subcultures. Therefore, the "contradictory youth" culture naturally has a subcultural attribute, not only from the characteristics of rebellion and resistance, but also from the shaping of youth culture by the network media in the new media era.
At the moment when the Internet occupies various scenes of social life, the comprehensive use of words and pictures, and the synchronous presentation of sound and video bring richer sensory enjoyment and satisfaction to young people, and also make them prefer entertainment and relaxed expression. When they encounter various setbacks and emergencies in their lives, they often borrow rich audio and video symbols to express themselves with a relaxed and witty attitude. The rise of the Internet and social media has provided a platform for the personality performance of young people, and young people have also realized self-presentation and group performance in the interaction of constructing group exclusive discourse, and the subcultural characteristics and values in the "contradictory youth" network buzzword lie in this.
Youth reflexivity: an attempted mechanism for re-embedding in society. The reflexivity of young people is also one of the factors that catalyze the spread of ambivalence that "dissolves while struggling" and "escaping while inspiring". Ulrich Baker, a professor of sociology at the University of Munich in Germany, believes that reflexivity is the result of the development of modern society, and individual reflexivity is the epitome of social structural and institutional changes. The development of industrialization and the transformation of new technologies have led to the radicalization of modernity, in the process of social change, some young people may become vulnerable when they are affected by social shocks, and they urgently need to re-embed new social scenes in a new way, so there is ambivalence, and corresponding confrontational expressions are frequent.
Modern society is going through a painful period of transformation, a process that manifests itself at the individual level as self-confrontation and conflict. At the same time, due to the increase in the risk of uncertainty, the individual meaning gradually dries up, which also leads to the emergence of self-dissolution behavior. Borrowing the mechanism of "reflexivity" can explain the motivation of "contradictory youth": on the one hand, "reflection" and "self-confrontation" are the specific manifestations of the mechanism of youth reflexivity; on the other hand, "young individuals" use network media to achieve the withdrawal of traditional lifestyles, and re-try to "re-embed" society to achieve their own demands.
This process of "re-embedding" needs to be realized through the form of "self-dissolution" and "self-confrontation", in the face of the cruel situation of social life, it is better to self-deprecatingly label yourself as "a rotten master", "a small town to be a problemmaker", "an inner volume" and "lying flat", rather than compromise with the adult world and be an adult who "should be so". It is also the prominence of this reflexive "contradiction" that provides young people with an attempt and a way to re-embed themselves in society.
Meritorious Society: An ambient sound that exacerbates the formation of ambivalence. Han Byung-chol, a Korean-German philosopher, once proposed in his book "The Society of Burnout": "The society of the 21st century is no longer a discipline society, but a society of merit." Its members are no longer domesticated subjects, but meritorious subjects. Instead of improving people's lives, multitasking, user-friendly technology, and a culture of convenience, people suffer from disorders ranging from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder, and the spread of this discomfort is a manifestation of the inability to deal with negative experiences. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but also social and historical phenomena. ”
In this heroic social picture, the individual becomes the self that has been given infinite expansion, and the society is instead affected by excessive enthusiasm, which produces paradoxical freedom: in a highly secularized modern society, people seem to have gained incomparable freedom while also losing the relevant discipline of "how to live". As an emerging force in various social classes, due to the limited nature of social experience, resources and status, young people can only passively accept and cope with the accelerated scene of alienation under the merit society, and the tearing of ideals and reality makes the experience of young people's mental pain more intense, and the paradox of freedom in the merit society has become an environmental sound that aggravates the formation of ambivalence.
The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly pointed out: "Socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, and the main contradiction in mainland society has been transformed into a contradiction between the people's growing need for a better life and unbalanced and insufficient development." The "contradictory expression" of the youth group is precisely the cultural phenomenon that appears in the process of the transformation of the main contradictions of society, the existing rules and new norms are still running in, and the young people who are at the junction of the old and the new bear the brunt of this contrast and pressure, and the setbacks and tribulations they encounter in social reality will be reflected in the opposition and contradictions of the network language.
The healing and development of "conflicting youth"
★ Social level: give full understanding, and create a place and atmosphere for the play of emotional value. The "contradictory expression" of the Internet buzzword is the product of the development of the times, this phenomenon breaks through the mainstream discourse framework, and then achieves a new cultural paradigm and cultural relationship, the emergence and rise of this Internet buzzword shows the unique cultural temperament of mainland youth. At the social level, it is necessary to pay attention to the causes of youth ambivalence, and we cannot blindly deny and criticize or suppress opposition in a "one-size-fits-all" manner. In the face of setbacks and difficulties in life, everyone cannot stay out of the matter, and should have a better understanding of the practical problems and mental pains that contemporary young people are suffering, pay attention to the physical and mental health of young people, give more positive incentives, create a social space for healthy growth and development for young people, and truly solve the unavoidable, even unavoidable contradictions faced by young people. In 2019, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement: "Persist in taking the cultivation of socialist builders and successors as a fundamental task, and consolidate and expand the young mass base of the party's ruling power as a political responsibility." "It is necessary to respect youth culture, provide platforms and channels for young people to speak out, establish a benign reception and feedback mechanism, encourage young people to actively reflect real demands, and promote problem resolution and contradictions."
★ Cultural level: provide cultural guidance, positive and constructive leadership and support. Cultural guidance for youth groups should highlight constructiveness, pertinence and epochality. First of all, it is necessary to effectively rely on the core values of socialism to explain to the youth group the responsibilities and missions entrusted to them in the new era, and inspire young people to shoulder the heavy historical responsibility with the education of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. For example, in the "Youth Study" activity organized by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, a youth representative will be selected in each period, and immersive communication will be carried out in the form of videos close to life scenes and "walking and chatting" to guide the vast number of young people to unswervingly listen to the party and follow the party.
Second, guide young people to enhance their understanding and recognition of national history and culture, enhance their cultural self-confidence, so as to find their own positioning and form correct cognition in the historical trend of continuous development and progress. In the history study and education activities, we should also pay attention to the use of youth culture discourse methods, close to the thinking, voice and interest of young people, innovative forms of education, for example, the series of cartoons created by domestic military fan netizens "Backlight Flight" "That Year's Rabbit Those Things", in the form of cartoons to show the major events at home and abroad before and after the founding of New China, under the premise of ensuring historical authenticity, enhance the interest of cultural guidance, the comics have been adapted on the video platform, widely praised by young audiences, Allowing young people to review history while watching anime has greatly improved the national self-esteem and cultural self-confidence of young people.
Third, we should pay attention to cultivating and giving play to the role of young public opinion leaders, adopt the methods of "one belt and many belts" and "more belts", and enhance the effectiveness of education on young people's ideals and beliefs. Young opinion leaders can host debate programs with realistic focus in the news media to disseminate mainstream values in the collision of multiple views, or they can make positive reports on youth group portraits in combination with typical cases, such as young volunteers emerging in the fight against the epidemic. Through excavating and publicizing young people full of positive energy, let the whole society see more contemporary youth group portraits with responsibility and achievements, so that more young people can take the initiative to assume social responsibility while realizing personal value, and realize the unity of personal value and social value. Ultimately, guide young people to internalize the fulfillment of social responsibilities into conscious character, form soft constraints, and lead young people to find accurate positioning, clarify the direction, serve the society, and sincerely fulfill their mission.
★ Youth themselves: get rid of the alienated self and realize the true expression of self-worth. The "contradictory expression" of "contradictory youth" is a stage phenomenon of the current youth in the process of socialization, and to some extent, the contradictory cultural buzzword is only a way for contemporary youth to release negative emotions, and sometimes shows some optimism in decadence that is opposed to reality. The pace of life in modern society is accelerating, the competition in all walks of life is becoming increasingly fierce, and in the face of the rapid changes in the current social life and the intensification of competition, young people's life goals and career choices will be deeply affected. Sailing against the current, if you do not advance, you will retreat, and in the face of setbacks and difficulties in work and life, it is more necessary to enhance the courage of young people to bear the burden and the ability to solve problems. Contradictory culture network buzzwords can only be used as a short-term "placebo", and work should be carried out in a timely manner to reduce or eliminate its negative impact, lead young people back to reality, maintain a high-spirited and enterprising posture, and sing the main theme of struggle and dedication on the long road of life. Whether the future and hope of young people as a country and a nation are lofty or not, and whether their convictions are firm, is directly related to the development momentum and potential of a country and a nation in their progress. Only by bravely facing difficulties, breathing with the times, and sharing a common destiny with the people can young people better improve their realm of life and realize the value of life.
As General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement: "As long as young people are brave enough to shoulder heavy burdens, overcome difficulties and brave risks, socialism with Chinese characteristics can be full of vitality, stamina and hope." "The whole society should continue to cultivate, nurture and inspire young people with positive energy, and young people should also strive for self-management, self-drive and self-improvement." With a positive attitude towards life, we should bravely get rid of our alienated self, express ourselves more authentically, and bravely undertake our mission and continue to struggle in the great practice of the new era.
Excerpt from | People's Forum magazine in April
Original title | the youth mentality behind the Internet buzzwords
New Media Editor | Chang Chang
The original editor is | Xie Shuai
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