Youth's "Curiosity" under the Discourse of Internet Culture

Author: Simon Huang

In recent years, the atmosphere of knowledge sharing and interaction formed on bullet screen video websites such as Station B has constituted a new trend in network culture. A number of knowledge-based video bloggers have gone to the stage of public opinion and become internet celebrities in the eyes of many post-90s and post-00s.

For example, Luo Xiang, who talks about criminal law, Dai Jianye, who talks about classical literature, and Wang Pinxian, who shares the knowledge of geography and oceans. Even some fields that seem boring to the outside world, such as advanced mathematics, literary theory, ancient Chinese characters, etc., have professional video bloggers.

There are also some young people who are not "famous" but are good at making videos, and have become well-known UP masters in historical areas and knowledge sharing areas, such as the "Shituguan" that makes dynamic historical maps, the "Anzhou Mu" who uses videos to explain the history of the two Jin Dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the "Little John Khan" who tells interesting stories about the world with humorous language, and so on. In the message area and video barrage below their videos, many netizens left interesting comments, and some quite professional discussions, commenting and analyzing the video content, which made people lament the strong learning atmosphere of young people on the Internet today.

In the past, some people were prejudiced against the "curiosity" of young people, believing that learning knowledge was a chore, and if there was no test pressure, not many people would really be willing to take the initiative to learn. Under the law of test standards, such a view may have some truth, but it is undeniable that most people are actually curious about everything in the world, the key lies in how to tell the knowledge interestingly, how to tell and share knowledge without destroying the curiosity of the seeker. Therefore, an online cultural community like Station B plays the role of a platform in a sense, just like an open network academy, which circles a certain field of knowledge through different UP masters, and then realizes the joy of learning through interaction.

This fresh network culture phenomenon, in fact, the most critical element behind it, is to realize the fun of knowledge. While every generation is trying to make the process of imparting knowledge fun, it's not easy to really do it well. Cramming education is obviously not suitable for the ecology of network culture, and edutainment can make young people like to learn. One of the most direct ways is to use the expression that young people are keen on, such as the "ghost animal" video, which is talked about by many young netizens, and there are various popular "terriers" that also appear in the MAIN MOUTH OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING from time to time.

We can see that Professor Luo Xiang often uses the story of "Zhang San" when talking about legal knowledge, and after a long time, many netizens are quite familiar with this "extralegal Fanatic Zhang San", which is easy to increase the sense of substitution of knowledge, and those seemingly boring laws have become vivid. For example, some people did not like history in the past because some teachers in the classroom would only read the textbook, while some UP masters made excellent historical map videos, with professional and interesting copywriting, it is easy to make people have a sense of history, and learning history is as easy as watching a movie.

In addition to being interesting, the interactivity on the online platform community cannot be ignored. Bullet screens can increase the interactivity of the video, even when watching the video alone, you can also "chat" with other small partners through a dense bullet screen, although these bullet screens do not have real-time, they are distributed in every corner of the video, and the highlights in any video will attract people to stop and watch and leave a bullet screen. Therefore, the bullet screen plays the role of "learning companion" to a large extent, which is a feature that the previous knowledge sharing methods did not have, and also increased the possibility of more young people entering professional learning by "firing bullet screens" and "playing with terriers".

At the same time, the bullet screen video website has formed a community of online cultural discourse. The British sociologist Sigismund Bowman once said: "The community is a cozy place, a warm and comfortable place, like a home." Here, people are safe and free from worry and anxiety. "In fact, the offline book club is a community, the online video learning space is a community, and it has almost no boundaries and thresholds, no matter what the academic background, as long as they want to learn, they can join it." This completely breaks the traditional model of relying on learning schools to distinguish "cultural identity", Peking University Tsinghua Doctor can be the UP master, junior high school students can also send videos - as long as he likes, and someone is willing to watch. In fact, even those who are well-known in the knowledge area UP, there are many people who do not have doctoral titles or graduated from prestigious universities, but their professional standards are excellent, and they are more adapted to the expression on the Internet, it is possible to become well-known bloggers and attract more people to pay attention to a certain professional field.

After this kind of learning community is gradually formed, it will also gradually solve the problem of self-emergence of some online communities and form more consensus. When this culture of learning and knowledge interaction becomes mainstream, websites will also form a more explicit cultural discourse. Even those young netizens who have just joined will be included in this discourse system, stimulating their inner curiosity about knowledge and starting an online learning journey. In this sense, we can more deeply understand the "curiosity" of young people under the discourse of network culture, which is not only a fresh network culture, but also a constantly changing way of discourse. (Simon Wong)

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel