A phenomenon even more terrible than the proliferation of short videos is destroying children's critical thinking
You who swipe your mobile phone every day must not realize that you are falling into the abyss of "new yellow news". When spam is rampant, how can we nurture the next generation?
Author: Lizheng Mom, Senior Children's Emotional Intelligence Management Guidance Consultant of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and Children's Reading Promoter of the Library Association of China
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Before the start of school, a video of "Qin Lang Paris lost his winter vacation homework" appeared on various platforms. Anchors from all parties rushed to take the stage to recognize the baby, claiming to be parents, teachers, relatives, and even some people pretended to be "Uncle Qin Lang" to start a live broadcast to earn traffic, and the number of likes was as high as 220,000 in a short period of time.
With the fermentation of the incident, the truth surfaced, and the heads of many Xichang primary schools across the country said that there was no such person, and the person who claimed to be his "uncle" bluntly said that he was "rubbing traffic" in the face of doubts, and welcomed everyone to "report". In the end, his video account was banned for violating the regulations, and the related videos were taken down.
The reversal of the incident several times has attracted social attention, and the central media has also criticized - "It doesn't matter who Qin Lang is, but the flood of new yellow news is dangerous." ”
What is the "new yellow journalism"? You may not know, but you must have seen it.
In the age of the Internet, the proliferation of short videos has killed the news
The concept of yellow journalism originated in the 19th century in the American newspaper industry, when newspaper tycoons Hirst and Pulitzer competed by using provocative headlines to describe stimulating and entertaining content to cater to the tastes of the lower audience, in order to please the masses and increase newspaper sales.
This mode and style, which was incendiary, exciting, and interesting, and sensationalized and eye-catching, brought huge profits and caused newspapers across the country to follow suit. About one-third of the nation's major newspapers at the time were purely yellow.
However, most of these newspapers are vulgar, false, and have no bottom line, do not provide any thinking and value, and also damage the authenticity and objectivity of the news and the credibility of the media.
American scholar Emory & Sons criticized in "The History of American Journalism: A History of Mass Media Interpretation" -
"Yellow journalism is a new style of journalism without a soul. Journalists, while claiming to care about 'the people,' clog the news channels that ordinary people rely on with the kind of news that is appalling, flashy, exciting, and indifferent, turning life's major problems into cheap farces and news into the most suitable thing for newsboys to sell. Worst of all, yellow journalism not only fails to provide effective leadership, but rather justifies crime, sexuality and violence. ”
But I didn't expect that today, more than 100 years later, a new wave of yellow journalism is making a comeback on short video platforms.
Eye-catching headlines with bold black on a yellow background, accompanied by brainwashing music from rotten streets as background sounds, exaggerate and exaggerate unimportant news, use titles and layouts that are easy to cause ambiguity, and even fabricate all kinds of sensational stories.
The themes are all-encompassing, such as short parents, funny jokes, bloody violence, and chicken soup for the soul...... But most of the content is unnutritious and incomprehensible.
A video of "A man squatting down to tie his shoes was attacked by the gate, and the dog on the side laughed" attracted a lot of multimedia and self-media accounts, competing to forward it;
A video of "Girls take off their boots after the security check on a plane, it's very socially dead, and passers-by have to take a look", which is less than 10 seconds, plus a response from the party, with more than 600,000 likes;
A "woman took pictures on a boat, and suddenly a fish jumped on the boat", the content can be summarized in one sentence with the title, which is meaningless, and after being forwarded by major blue Vs, it actually swept the whole network;
Such a shoddy and boring video, at first glance, you can't look at it at all, but you frequently brush it up. They are like "psoriasis ads" that fill the major news outlets, appear in your phone, and make you feel like you are smoking "spiritual opium" and can't stop.
What's even sadder is that the reading and like rates of this kind of news are still much higher than those of traditional serious news. So much so that many mainstream media have to lower the bottom line of news media people for the sake of traffic and join this wave of "short, flat and fast" yellow news.
The proliferation of short videos kills not only the meaning and value of news, but also the public's ability to read and think deeply.
Seeing is not believing:
The information cocoon engulfs everyone
Zhang Xuefeng, a graduate school entrance examination tutor who was once subjected to cyberbullying, once said the remarks of "reporting journalism and being stunned" in the live broadcast, but was pinched off and taken out of context, and made various small videos and posted them on the Internet, which attracted overwhelming accusations and abuse for a while, and set off an uproar.
No one cares about the full video of the incident, it was when he persuaded a Xinjiang candidate in the live broadcast room in 2022, this child scored 590 points in the science mock exam and 130 points in mathematics, and the child wanted to apply for journalism in a 985 college, Zhang Xuefeng ridiculed his parents "Don't let him study journalism even if he is knocked out".
The reason why Zhang Xuefeng said such a thing is because in Xinjiang, this score means that he has a greater choice, and the candidate can freely choose his major at Huazhong University of Science and Technology to get a better way out.
But this important background information did not appear in the relevant reports. Some reports from the media and the media seized Zhang Xuefeng's sentence "don't report the news major" and began to make a big fuss.
It is precisely because of this sentence, which was taken out of context, that Zhang Xuefeng fell into a huge whirlpool of controversy, triggering a discussion that continues to this day about whether journalism is worth learning.
Later, in the comeback live broadcast, Zhang Xuefeng said frankly, "I don't dare to talk nonsense."
Because in the era of self-media where "traffic is king", for the so-called "gimmick", they do not hesitate to distort and conceal the facts, pinch the head and remove the tail, and show off the crown and Li Dai to win traffic.
Like, collect, share, one hit three times in a row, your seemingly simple actions, in fact, every time you press the thumb, you are strengthening the algorithm logic of the Internet to build an "information cocoon" for yourself, depriving yourself of the real world in disguise.
Every time you stay in front of the video, it will be counted by big data, and the algorithm will accurately push similar news to you, and over time, what you see is what big data thinks "you want to see". And you are unconsciously led away, your vision is getting narrower and narrower, but you still ignorantly think that this is what the world is "real".
independent thinking,
to be able to stand in a sober place
Under the wave of the Internet, a huge amount of information is rushing, and pearls and silt are wrapped in each other.
Maybe you, who brush your mobile phone every day, don't care too much about the harm caused by the "new yellow news", and you think it's okay to just laugh after watching boring videos.
But we have to be vigilant, children who are not deeply involved in the world and have not yet established a healthy outlook on the world, can they make correct judgments and not be affected when faced with such inferior small videos or all kinds of information circulating on the Internet?
Today's new generation of children is known internationally as the "Alpha Generation α" and "Generation Alpha". As an aboriginal who grew up in the Internet, it is inevitable that we need to plunge into the great wave of the Internet, but we will also fall into the trap of "information cocoon" in minutes.
How children can learn to distinguish the true from the false, screen out high-quality information, and learn to think independently, but not become a narrow bar, in the overwhelming information, this requires the reasonable guidance of our parents.
Last year, there was a news that several generations of us read "Hou Yi Shooting the Sun" from childhood to adulthood, and we never felt that there was a problem. But a sharp-eyed post-10 primary school student read the flaw - "The former paragraph mentions that 'the water in the rivers has been evaporated', and the next paragraph says that Hou Yi 'waded through ninety-nine big rivers'." Let this text, which has appeared in Chinese textbooks for decades and has not been corrected, get an official response from the People's Education Publishing House - "The wording is inappropriate, and the next edition will be revised." ”
The same "true" story is that a little boy in Lhasa, Tibet, found the stubble of the astronomy experience hall. At a glance, I found a video introducing the Yangtze River No. 3 but put a picture of the Yangtze River No. 5, and the separation order of the Yangtze River No. 5 was also wrong.
When netizens were ridiculing the newborn calf for not being afraid of tigers, the boy's "questioning" was officially appreciated by the Chinese military industry, praising the child's first-class professional knowledge, and affirming his keen observation and bold spirit of questioning authority.
was also slapped in the face by the post-10s generation, as well as Nongfu Spring, a company owned by China's richest man Zhong Sui.
Ke Zishuo, a fifth-grade student in Hangzhou, stumbled upon a mistake in the "pine sparrowhawk" painted on the bottle of Nongfu Spring. It is pointed out that "the northernmost record of the pine sparrow hawk in China is Lushun, Liaoning, which is still eight or nine hundred kilometers away from Changbai Mountain." The pine sparrow hawk has only five wing fingers, while the bird of prey on the mineral water bottle has six wing fingers and is more pronounced than the pine sparrow hawk. A closer look reveals that the morphological features of the head are also different. ”
In the face of the little child's "picking", Nongfu Spring came forward in time to admit his mistake, and also rewarded the boy's school with a library card worth 10,000 yuan, and invited him to visit the water source as a reward for his serious pursuit of this spirit.
We have to praise these milky children, who seem to be nitpicking, but behind them is this rare independent thinking ability in this era of clouds and clouds.
In foreign countries, the ability to obtain, analyze, and evaluate various information, and to draw one's own opinions after reasoning and reasoning is called media literacy education. This has been included in the compulsory curriculum of primary and secondary schools in Europe and the United States, but in China, it is still blank.
There was a joke about a professor who asked his students, "What do you think about the famine that is happening in other countries?"
Students in Europe asked: "Famine", what is it?
What do American students mean by "other countries"?
Chinese students asked, "Opinion", what is "what do I have"?
Chinese children, who have been accustomed to cramming education since childhood, are seriously lacking in the ability to think independently.
And the cultivation of this ability is inseparable from the eight words "independent thinking and rational judgment". The key is not to be gullible or blindly follow information, to remain objective and rational, to think, discuss, and identify through reliable sources, and then to form your own opinions.
When we envy other people's children for "having opinions and ideas", we might as well ask more about whether we have given our children space to explore and think in the process of raising them.
The child who dared to question Nongfu Spring stemmed from his love and research for birds. In the face of the child's hobby of "not doing his job", his parents not only supported him in subscribing to magazines such as "Naturalism" and "Natural Science", but also used weekends to accompany him to go bird watching.
When he found the error in the advertisement, he did not despise his opinion, but accompanied him to inquire about the information, found some good examples of technical and compatible key identification features from the book, and finally wrote a reasonable article, refuting the experts' so-called "Nongfu Spring pays attention to artistic effects when designing, so the pattern is not accurate", helping children withstand the pressure and proving that "artistic effects and scientific accuracy are not in conflict".
It is the unconditional support of "other people's parents" that allows "other people's children" to have the ability to think independently of the world.
"Dare to criticize and question, explore and solve problems", "be able to learn independently, think independently", "learn to obtain, judge and process information, and have the ability to learn and develop in the information age". This is what the new era requires of this generation of students. (From the General High School Curriculum Standards launched by the Ministry of Education in 2017)
And this ability needs to be deliberately cultivated for a long time, and it is inseparable from the strong support of parents.
On the way of children's growth, I hope you and I can become "other people's parents". In this era of information torrent, abandon assembly line products and cultivate "other people's children".