Text/Xu Sang
Edited by Du Yang
In the live broadcast room, two young drama actors are using their drama to interpret a set of "famous scenes" in the online literature "I Learn to Kill God in a Mental Hospital" - Yang Jian's domineering expulsion of the invading outer gods in the fog. One actor pretended to be Yang Jian, and the other pretended to be the prison warden Chen Fuzi, alternately reciting narration for each other's performance passages, sometimes witty, sometimes passionate. The camera advances, and the expressions of some actors seem to rush out of the screen and kill the gods......
It's an innovative exploration of reading.
In the current era of screen reading, reading has taken on a diverse and rich form - we read words, images, sounds, history or some object fonts, and even read the moments between people, where spirit and emotion flow with each other.
On April 23, World Book Day, Tomato Novels held a 24-hour live broadcast of reading, and guests from different fields participated in this "reading marathon", sharing their stories with books and exploring the rich forms of reading together.
〓 On April 23, "World Book Day", Tomato Novels held a 24-hour live broadcast of reading
This cross-time zone, cross-regional, and cross-industry live broadcast presents the infinite possibilities of reading in terms of profundity and breadth:
Aerospace engineer Lu Xi shared how to read the engine of a spaceship, the power system is the "grammar", and the parts and components are the "thesaurus", the museum researcher Zhang Jingwei explores how to read the Qin bricks and Han tiles "immersively", the art historian Cao Xingyuan reads the paintings and art installations of ancient and modern China and foreign countries, and the writers Li Jingze and Qiao Ye re-read the classics with thoughts about modernity......
10.265 million people watched the cultural event. The 24-hour uninterrupted relay live broadcast is also an innovation in the industry.
Taking Book Day as an opportunity, Tomato Fiction is committed to discovering the unique value of reading for everyone. Reading is unbiased, no matter what you read or when you do it, reading is a beautiful thing and a necessary spiritual dwelling place in today's fast-paced life.
〓 Documentary director Zhou Hao (left) and former media personality and writer Li Haipeng (right)
Reading, expanding life
In the live broadcast room of "Reading Day", literary writer Han Songluo spoke softly and with some feelings, recalling his reading experience since he was young:
In the 80s, there was no entertainment on remote farms in the Northwest. One autumn evening, my uncle took my 6-year-old self and began to recite a poem, "That night the moon was very big and bright, shining in through the window and shining on the table, and my uncle wrote down the words one by one. The power went out twice in one night, but he still didn't stop writing. I'll always remember that night. ”
Looking back on the past, Han Songluo feels that life is like a curve, with peaks and valleys, and reading can give people spiritual support and nourishment, so that people can survive tenaciously during the trough period. "Reading is an expansion of our lives, and it is incomparable to any form of entertainment or learning. ”
〓 Writer Han Songluo (left) and writer Sun Yisheng (middle)
This reading experience also made Han Songluo decide early on to engage in work related to reading and writing. In his opinion, the best way to read a book is to write, and some of the truths of reading can be understood immediately after starting to write.
Han Songluo was born in a city called Celle. Celle has been eroded by sand and desert all year round, and the wind blows the city, and people have to move frequently. The most common experience of locals growing up is running away and parting. "If a friend suddenly says, 'Let's have dinner tomorrow,' that's usually a sign of goodbye. That's why for many years I was afraid to hear this, and I always felt that something was wrong. Han Songluo said.
Recently, he decided to publish a book about the exodus, "Late Spring Love Stories": it contains six stories, with different characters and scenes, but all of them contain "exodus", and they all play a period song - also about Han Songluo's own era story.
In fact, such writing based on life experience resonates with writers in different fields.
Since childhood, I like to read online literature, and I started my own online writing in my senior year. Although it is a fantasy novel, life observations and experiences have also become a reservoir for the creation of the Sanjiu Vocal Range.
The original inspiration for his masterpiece "I Learn to Kill God in a Mental Hospital" came from a flood that broke out that year, and there were border soldiers and many ordinary people who rushed to fight the flood - Sanjiu Vocal Domain felt that such a silent guardian should be seen.
Therefore, in his new book "I Am Not a God of Drama", which has reached the pinnacle of tomato novels, he tries to explore the story of how human beings use spiritual power to continue civilization in the case of the regression of material civilization by constructing a new world view.
〓 Sanjiu Range's new book "I Am Not the God of Drama" is on the tomato novel summit list
Immediately after the chapters are updated daily, a variety of paragraph reviews or book reviews will appear, and many readers will make predictions about the future plot. Sanjiu Vocal Domain attaches great importance to such reading feedback, and when he encounters excellent ideas, he will consider adopting them, and adjust the outline at any time according to the comments, so as to avoid the subsequent plot being guessed and falling into clichés.
For him, a college student who didn't know anything about publishing, the support of a platform like Tomato Novel was very important - it provided an opportunity to get close to the readers, so that writing a book for publication was no longer a distant thing. The interaction with readers is like an interesting game, and it has also created an endless stream of creativity in the field of online literature.
〓 Tomato Novel Peak List Writer "Sanjiu Range"
Encouraging writers to create based on life experience and keeping a concern for reality has always been the sentiment of Tomato Novels.
In the live broadcast, Chen Lingyun, editor of literary books, mentioned that the meaning of literature is rich, and literature also has different effects for people of different ages: when they are young, literature usually provides a model life or a kind of emotional comfort, and in the face of declining or declining trends, literature can also give confidence to middle-aged people.
Looking into the distance, the narrative of the times
For content creators who are good at recording and observing the times, caring about different civilizations and worlds is also an important proposition. In the live broadcast room, several writers set their sights on the distance and shared their stories of "living elsewhere".
Liu Zichao, a travel writer, often travels to different countries around the world, from Central Asia to Eastern Europe, writing as he goes. As a post-80s generation, he said that he is a generation that has witnessed the wave of "globalization", accompanying the process of China's integration into the world.
But how to gradually find, accept, and describe this world experience is a new topic, and the writing of this process also requires a Chinese perspective. Liu Zichao's feeling is that when he goes to read books on Central Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East, it is difficult to find Chinese writing, "Before you go there, you can only use other people's perspectives and other people's thinking to understand that place." ”
When Liu Zichao shared, he felt that everyone's understanding and writing have their own "framework". Facing the same landscape, the world view is different, the scenery seen is different, and the things produced are completely different. Through the "framework" of literature, we can see the different charms of each person's worldview.
〓 Poet Ouyang Jianghe (middle) and travel writer Liu Zichao (right)
At the same time, traveling, writing, and reading are complementary. He believes that when looking at the scenery of a place, there are always limitations to the individual's single perspective, and he must rely on daily reading to discover the "little secrets" beneath the surface. The more you read, the more you can find some unexpected connections between things - this is a very interesting point of reading.
Therefore, Liu Zichao's next plan is to walk along the "shadow line" - starting from Syria, and then going all the way to Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, like the shadows on the Asian continent, all of which are countries in trouble. He wanted to understand these countries in more nuanced terms.
Also concerned about Syria is Wang Qi, an international journalist from far away in Europe. But she mentioned that the most common question she encounters in her work is the need to focus on distant places. People always ask her, why do I pay attention to the refugee children in Syria? I work in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou every day, roll in, and work as a social animal 996, why do I spend my spare energy paying attention to the suffering in the distance?
Later, Wang Qi gradually realized that it is not enough to have factual, rigorous, and logical news reports, but also to improve collective empathy and convey an emotion or message that what happens in the distance is related to everyone in our land. Understanding what is happening in the distant world is also a reference to one's own situation, expanding the boundaries of the world's imagination.
As a creator, Wang Qi has begun to explore more ways to tell stories and convey emotions in the past few years, such as using voice, recording friends chatting and discussing, cutting into international public issues in a more intimate and soft way, and creating the possibility of empathy. She emphasized that in an increasingly lonely and radical era, we need to connect and see each other.
In Tomato novels, the concern for different civilizations and the world has always been an important theme of the work. Some novels use Western fantasy to construct a worldview, some integrate Chinese elements into the world style to collide, and some tell romantic love stories that take place in a foreign country. Through reading, readers can immerse themselves in the subtleties of multiculturalism.
Yan Fei, a sociologist who is far away in Boston, shared his methodology for reading "unfamiliar urban society" in the live broadcast - "using address as a method" and going to Citywalk.
〓 During the live broadcast, Yan Fei, a sociologist who was far away in Boston, was connected live
In Yan Fei's view, the current society is speeding up. Whether it is working in a big city or traveling to an Internet celebrity city, people are always moving fast, holding their mobile phones to check in, and going to one destination after another, seemingly always in a state of "suspension": they can't see the surrounding scenery, and they don't have a deep connection with the city.
Slow down, Yan Fei told his inner self. For the past year, he has tried to slow down his pace and rediscover a city through reading.
Yan Fei borrowed a book called "The Bridge on the Charles River" from the library. In the book, the author records a lot of daily interactions with Boston locals, such as a young man reading Comintern books in a bookstore or an immigrant working in a barbershop.
Yan Fei, who was touched by this, also began to walk like this. He noticed that a chair had recently been added to the community park with a text engraved on it to commemorate a deceased couple. "I searched for their names on the Internet and saw photos and stories of them serving the community for 40 years as ordinary people in the community...... I feel like they're coming back to life, and I feel the bond and connection between people in the community. Through the screen, Yan Fei happily conveyed his feelings.
This is a gradual and immersive experience: walking through the small streets and alleys of the city that you don't know, discovering the bits and pieces of the city's history, and gradually having more experiences of the city's culture and historical mechanism, on top of the experience, people can get out of a state of work anxiety, gain a new understanding of the city, and meet new friends.
"In this way, my life and reading will be closely integrated, and my life can be more colorful and interesting. Yan Fei said.
Future-proof
In this conference of reading and self-exchange, AI is always frequently mentioned by the guests.
The former "World Olympiad Champion", Liu Zhiyu, who later became a monk and returned to the world, wore a simple plaid shirt and joined the live broadcast room. With a smile on his face and a calm tone, he talked about his entrepreneurial exploration of psychological counseling in the past two years.
Can artificial intelligence replace psychological counseling? During the live conversation, a question was immediately raised.
can't be replaced, Liu Zhiyu quickly gave a negative answer. He pointed out that the core lies in the lack of empathy, "AI has not gone through people's lives and difficulties. When you're chatting with an AI, you don't feel like it's really understanding you and empathizing with you. ”
〓 Chiyu Yanagi
He gave an example - even for people who have not given birth to children, he can imagine and understand the pain of having a child based on other pains he has experienced, and he can empathize to a certain extent, but for AI that has no painful experience at all, the empathy effect will be much worse.
The guest who talked to Liu Zhiyu, Luo Yihang, a technology practitioner, nodded in agreement. He emphasized that people's resonance, dissent, or emotional flow based on reading and life experience cannot be simply replaced by machines.
〓 Luo Yihang wrote a message after the event: "Reading is a very personal thing"
For example, the book "Every Step of Life Counts" records Liu Zhiyu's ups and downs over the years, including setbacks and struggles, as well as recognition and thinking. If the book is "fed" to a current AI model as a corpus, the output is usually just a synthetic content interpretation.
"It's too easy to understand, it's impossible to understand how our carbon-based life has gone through such a difficult and complex journey. Liu Zhiyu sighed.
It is worth noting that in recent years, AI has made many technological breakthroughs in content generation, and more and more authors have begun to use AI to assist in creation.
Science fiction writer Chen Qiufan tried to write with the help of AI tools as early as 2017, and it continues to this day. He shared his experience in the live link: At present, AI is still based on learning from text and semantic relationships, and it does not really understand how the real world works—for example, from the more basic laws of physics, human relationships, etc. "Only when technology advances to this stage can we say that AI can come close to the level of human creation. ”
Chen Qiufan pointed out another deficiency of today's AI technology, which is in dealing with "complex settings": writing suspense and science fiction novels usually has complicated settings and reversals, and it is necessary to "dig holes first and then fill them in".
"Sometimes in the process of writing, I don't know what I want to do with this prop, but when I write it, I realize that it can take a big step forward in the plot. That's when I realized that the human brain is so good, it does a lot of calculations in the background, probably subconscious. What these AIs can't do now, it doesn't have the ability to reason deeply and make logical judgments. That's one of the wonderful things about writing. ”
However, AI technology has advanced rapidly, and the same guest, a member of the insecticide team of suspense online writers, emphasized, "A few months ago, my opinion on AI was still not very intelligent, and I wrote without emotion, but maybe a few months later, it has completely subverted my imagination." Although it is not yet, AI must one day be a powerful tool for writers. ”
〓 Science fiction author Sugar Bandit (middle) and Tomato Novel Peak List writer "Pest Killer Member" (right)
AI technology has undergone subversive changes, and with it, science fiction novels that "write the future" are also facing changes.
Chen Qiufan said with a slightly wry smile that writing science fiction in this era is very thankless. After the advent of chatGPT, the imagination and future scenes of AI are completely different from the original, "Sometimes it doesn't take long for what you write to become reality, or it is slapped in the face by reality, how can imagination catch up with the pace of reality?"
He mentions another somewhat worrisome phenomenon, which is that today's tech news has been written like science fiction, and real science fiction seems to be easily drowned out.
"In fact, today's technology news is quietly stealing lessons from science fiction novels and learning narratives. Some of the headlines are written crazier than fiction for the sake of traffic. In the second half of the livestream, another science fiction writer, Sugar Bandit, joined the discussion of this "science fiction crisis".
In the sugar bandit's view, forward-looking is not the core point of science fiction. Authors should not only see how far technology has developed, but also explore and reflect on the social logic behind technology.
"In fact, science fiction is not a prediction of the future. Science fiction writers are responsible for our present and today. Science fiction changes reality by influencing its direction and leads it to what kind of future it leads to - this is cause and effect. The sugar bandit said.
"You can't wait for the future to come straight to you, it's important to find a position to protect yourself. In the live broadcast room, the writers looked at each other and smiled.