Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Slag County
题图|Maxim Dondyuk
This article was first published on the Tiger Sniff Youth Content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the faces, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
After the end of World War II in 1945, the world entered a new phase, which the Cold War scientist Cadiz called - The Long Peace, the long peace.
Joichi Hisashi, Hitoshi no Hitohei.
Despite decades of local conflicts, the vast majority of humanity in the world has enjoyed a golden age of peace when nuclear deterrence has caged careerists, and wars related to trenches, stumps and broken arms have become distant symbols that we can only feel and know through memoirs, documentaries and films.
Perhaps because they have not experienced it in real life, people's understanding of war is sometimes skewed. Sometimes, people can re-understand the cruelty of war from movies like Russia's "Purgatory", and more often, people can read a trace of romance and anticipation from more war movies surrounded by popcorn that call for the instinct of fishing and hunting.
Either way, when the Internet was not as widespread as it is today, people still had a "feeling" about war.
But when the war is really mapped to people's retinas through live broadcasts, the war becomes like a long soap opera for the audience, and people start to watch it like a play:
Appreciate and evaluate the performances of the same kind of survival, fighting, and dying in the muddy trenches.
A year ago, after Russia announced the launch of a "special military operation", the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was regarded by some Western scholars as the end of the era of peace.
The media is also anxious to give this war a special character.
In February 2022, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described the Russia-Ukraine conflict this way: "It's a war that individuals need to empower with just one smartphone to cover on Tiktok. ”
As he said, the war, which took place in a land with an Internet penetration rate of 79.2 percent, has indeed provided two-thirds of the world's human beings with a means to experience war up close through the blessing of technology.
But what is interesting is that when war is really shown naked and instantaneous, the images of war are no longer simply serious and documentary for human beings:
Judging from the barrage, messages and second creations, the current picture of war is more like a pop culture product that is regularly serialized.
War videos are like a serial drama to viewers.
On domestic Douyin, some Chinese will share their war life in Russia and Ukraine, they belong to different camps, but the content shared is very different, sometimes meals, sometimes weapons, and sometimes just free to chat.
Netizens who are concerned about the conflict will run to their Douyin to chase more, sometimes asking about common topics such as how much money you make and how to go, sometimes wishing bloggers a safe return, and sometimes cursing them to die early.
Good soldiers are not listed, and he is the most well-known soldier blogger since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The good soldier is not listed as the name given to him by netizens, and his real name is unknown. The name was inspired by the Czech novelist Hašek's political satirical novel "The Good Soldier," written during the First World War. And the reason why he is called Bulie is because he frequently used the Russian-language curse "Блядь - Bulie" in a video he shot on the front line criticizing the logistics of the Russian army, hence the name.
On the Chinese internet, Good Soldier Bulie may be the only soldier who everyone wants him to live, because people feel that his trench video work shows an absurd sense of life:
There was no toilet paper or morphine on the battlefield, so he and his friends bartered grenades; when the military rations expired, they caught rats to satisfy their hunger when they had no meat to eat; and when they were bored in making videos, they even teased stray dogs with two coughs.
"We were soldiers in the 90s, and I heard that I could make money by going to Ukraine, and the conscription officer told me that I would definitely be assigned to the logistics department, and who knew that after I went, I would be directly placed on the front line where birds don't, and if I could go back alive, I would definitely kill the conscription director, no. He said this in a widely circulated video of the Good Soldier Column.
One of the major characteristics of modern warfare is that the frequency of updates of soldiers in the cyber world is the same as that of real life, and any blogger who is in the line of fire updates late, netizens will leave a message saying that this person is not updated, and he must be dead. So for soldiers, Tiktok has a meaning in addition to entertainment, which is a declaration that proves that they are still alive.
In the last content about him on the Internet, his relatives in the rear positions saw his trenches surrounded and shelled by Ukrainian troops, and the good soldier called for support through walkie-talkies, saying that he was homesick.
Then all the news about this interesting person disappeared into the flames of war, and everything was unknown.
More often than not, war videos are more like a variety show.
Whether it is the video of the street battle in the Kazakh-Israeli conflict, or the video of the drone air raid with rock music and the emotional drone air raid that happened on the battlefield in Ukraine, the stumps and plasma will not suppress people's enthusiasm for watching.
Ukrainian soldiers who crawl on the frozen soil of Eastern Europe with their limbs cut off will be jokingly called "Ukrainian" and Russian soldiers who are struggling in trenches with badly injured trachea will be praised for their cuteness...... When message boards become a stage for peaceful world audiences to practice their political ideas, every ridicule of the tragic death of a soldier becomes a free participation in the list.
In the eyes of Andrew Hoskins, a professor at the University of Glasgow, these unchecked and unmoderated content is frightening: "I think that on some platforms, every image and video violates the Geneva Conventions...... For example, the Convention prohibits the dissemination of photographs of the dead and upholds the dignity of prisoners of war. ”
In the past, it may take years to train a brave soldier, but now, the person who holds the remote control stick and presses the button to kill him may only need to train for a few months, and the massive application of drones has completely changed human warfare, but the simultaneous production of video data has also made death the material for hunting videos, in the eyes of those who applaud death, sympathy is the heart and weakness of the Virgin, and sorrow for the other side is the contradiction between friend and foe, which really magnifies the magic of the world.
As time goes by, you will find that the hunting videos become more and more bloody, the killing becomes a stimulant for traffic, and death is no longer solemn and becomes a daily routine to be ridiculed.
From repeatedly crushing wounded soldiers with tanks, to drones zooming in on the bloody bodies of enemy soldiers who had just been blown up, the bloody videos released by Panbi have become another confrontation outside the battlefield.
The gore of both sides to solicit curiosity, along with likes, views, and comments, constitutes a cyber view to demoralize your opponents, and like a competition, you rush to develop more slaughter tricks, and then on Telegram or whatever, with a grand offer.
As the bloody content of the war was leaked on the Telegram platform, people began to discuss privacy and ethics in the war, but in the eyes of the sharer, this sharing was a kind of record - "If the concentration camps were liberated and the corpses were not recorded, would anyone believe us?"
The Russian army used Tchaikov's violin music on Telegram to show the corpses of the Ukrainian army killed in battle, and the Ukrainian army built a cargo 200 (руз 200, a military term that began in the Soviet era, meaning the code name for transporting corpses) to display photos of Russian prisoners and corpses.
Romantics will find these images that reveal the cruelty of war to be the best teaching materials for calling for no more war in the future, but in the eyes of scholars, the meaning of cruel videos is meaningless.
Pavel Shchelin, a social cognitive psychology and communication scholar, makes a pessimistic point in an article titled "Digital Wars in Plain Sight":
While tools like Tiktok make it seem like war memories can be enriched, algorithms have made people's perception of the meaning of war more fragmented, and a large amount of excess information has consumed people's enthusiasm for attention, and those evidence will make them meaningless archives in the future, and eventually forgotten.
The wounds of war do not belong only to the soldiers thousands of miles away, it belongs to all those who feel it.
《心理科学》在2013年发布的一篇名为《Mental- and Physical-Health Effects of Acute Exposure to Media Images of the September 11, 2001, Attacks and the Iraq War》的论文，揭示了暴力视频对人健康状况的影响：
“...... Exposure to early television and cumulative acute stress associated with 9/11 for 4 hours or more per day predicts an increase in the incidence of health disease 2 to 3 years later......"
However, the physical impact is not the worst thing, and its psychological impact on the wider social group may be even more profound.
Nowadays, if you look at the comments under the posts related to the conflict, you will often find some comments about Palestinian love and what does the Russia-Ukraine issue have to do with me, and this situation is even more pervasive under Western social platforms.
Compassion fatigue is used to sum up the situation, where the brain automatically generates a protective mechanism in the face of constant frustration.
How are the wars that took place in the 20s of the 21st century different from those of the past?
I think for people living in peaceful areas, the biggest difference is reflected in our feelings, in the past, we understood war mostly through news pictures, pictures can always keep a warning distance from us, but now, for the first time, the raw, crude documentary video has broken this boundary, making this kind of stimulation more straightforward, and the impact on people more violent.
The war continues, and the video is still being produced. No one could have predicted what this series of videos of severed limbs and deaths would have on the future and what it could teach us.
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