Reporter | Pan Wenjie
Edit | Yellow Moon
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Flow tuning, full name epidemiological investigation. "Flow information" generally contains time, place, characters, events, simple outline, although there is no plot of inheritance and transition, but it has been able to outline a person's basic life appearance. A stream during the covid-19 epidemic in Shenyang in 2021 presented us with the life of a grandfather who loves to eat chicken racks, he goes to the restaurant twice a day, eating chicken racks, stews and noodles, and some netizens ridicule him for turning the streaming record into a Shenyang food strategy. Coincidentally, the flow of a 75-year-old grandmother in Guangzhou also involves a number of restaurants, restaurants and refreshments, either drinking tea or on the way to drink tea, netizens have commented "too Cantonese".
For example, last year, a 34-year-old Haidian father's key words were "middle-aged, graduate school, snail dwelling, commuting for 3 hours, taking a baby, traveling on business". Although the flow tune only records the movements of a person in a few days, it seems to have become a slice of his personal life, which is repeatedly watched, discussed and analyzed under the magnifying glass of public opinion. In the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tone became a unique, explicit text that could not be ignored. When we're talking about flow, what exactly are we concerned about?
Image credit: Visual China sees others in an era of limited attention
The Internet is not only a synthesis of multiple technologies, but also a decentralized medium, and our attention is competed for by countless pieces of information. In the book "The Moment of Epiphany", the writer Zhang Yueran believes that social news is full of human tragedies. "The compassionate nature of human beings allows us to sympathize with all those who suffer. But we are not God, our sympathy is not equally divided, and we always sympathize with some people more than others. "Why is it that people put their feelings on one part of the person and not choose the other? She believes that it may be due to similar circumstances, or it may be because the emotions revealed in them are the dark side of our emotions.
People tend to pin their feelings on people who remind us of our own situation, a tendency Freud called "the self-obsession with subtle differences." In the social sciences, one might explain this problem in terms of identity politics. In the book "Identity Politics: The Desire for Dignity and Recognition", political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes that the existence of identity politics stems from the neglect of individual dignity by society, and many groups feel that their identity is not recognized and respected enough, but the rise of identity politics has also led to the gradual lack of common denominator between different groups and groups, so Fukuyama feels that this is a road of no return that makes society more fragmented.
However, because of the virus, the situation has changed. In the book "Body, Space and Postmodernity", Wang Minan, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Humanities, saw from the experience of SARS that although infectious diseases isolate people's bodies from each other, this spatial isolation makes people connect with each other as never before. "The individual atom-like bodies are strikingly woven into a sense of homogeneity," a tense focus that holds people together.
Body, Space and Postmodernity
Wang Min'an
Nanjing University Publisher and Guardian 2022-1-1
In this case, the information importance of the stream is multiplied. In this case, information can produce huge prevention and control benefits, and it is also the most economical means of epidemic prevention. Wang Min'an believes that:
"Information, while reaching the individual, also creates and determines the individual, and it enables the individual to produce actual prevention and self-diagnosis behavior, and this power of information is no less powerful than the preventive government power and the medical treatment power. These three have become the 'trinity of epidemic prevention projects'. ”
At a time when everyone wants to get the flow of information to understand the situation and judge the risk, the lives of strangers have become relevant to us. The virus not only breaks the boundaries of the nation-state, but also dissolves the distinction between race and gender to a certain extent, so that people of different classes feel the instability of public health. In this case, the experience of illness and isolation of distant and unfamiliar individuals has also become a common concern of more people, which is not only a channel for judging the risk of their own infection, but also reflects a certain feeling of "breathing together and sharing fate". We have to focus on individuals outside the usual focus, regardless of class, ethnicity and gender, and the flow provides an opportunity for us to understand others and different living conditions.
It is to spy on others but also to discover the city
Today's cities are characterized by encounters, fragmented experiences and alienation, where kinship and geography are replaced by stranger relationships. Stranger societies give us both the opportunity to be free and to unleash our individuality, but also more isolation and loneliness—our own experience of existence is limited, and our vision of life is not rich enough. In a lonely society built by the dual forces of urbanization and the Internet, Canadian social critic Hal Niezvich argues that today's pop culture is actually a "peep culture." Some people like to show the details of their lives online, others take pleasure in watching it; some people like to peep, some people like to be spied on. Participating in reality shows, live broadcasting life, publishing microblogs and other behaviors are to a certain extent exposing themselves to maintain "self", while watching live broadcasts, reality shows, browsing other people's social network dynamics satisfies the desire of another person to "peep", which is the social collective voyeurism of our time.
Image source: Visual China
Having a strong curiosity about others can be said to be human instinct. Freud regarded human curiosity and the desire to "peep" as a kind of sexual instinct, driven by force bido. Lacan also has the term "imaginary gaze", in which he sees that the ideal of self is the image that is fixed when he looks at himself through the eyes of others. The "ego" is not to see the world with one's own eyes, but to see oneself with an external eye, and the essence of the self is that of others, "I can only see from a certain point, but in my existence, I am seen in all directions." So, from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is difficult for anyone to say that there is no peeping subconscious.
Reading flow is not simply a glimpse into the lives of others, but also shows us the possibility of seeing more aspects of life and urban fabric. As Wang Min'an said, although we all live in modern cities, in fact, people can only move through factories, schools, shopping malls, and residential places on a fixed basis, "Urban space looks open, infinitely extended, full of opportunities and secrets, but the masses can only position themselves in the coordinates established by chimneys, factories and residences." Although they are in the city, they know nothing about the secrets of the city. "People in the stream have been to places we are familiar with, and have imprinted their footsteps on places where we have never been, places we go to are fixed and limited, out of limited needs and visions, delimited by identity and relationships, but in the flow of the tune, through the places where others live and work, they glimpse the richness and great secrets of a city.
Benjamin borrowed the image of the Parisian poet Baudelaire to create the image of the "urban wanderer", which is the product of urban civilization. In Paris: The Birth of the Capital of Modernity, the geographer and thinker David Harvey describes such an urban wanderer as "a man determined to unravel the mystery of the relationship between the city and society." The new coronavirus "shots" who live between different locations in the flow of the tune also lead us to open one scene after another like urban wanderers.
The scene is an unwashed life
Although the original intention of the flow is only to prevent and control infectious diseases and find out the "intersection of time and space trajectories", the information provided by the reading stream for the public is far more than this.
In his book The Self-Presentation of Everyday Life, the American sociologist Owen Goffman likens the process of individuals and groups trying to produce and maintain ideal impressions in the presence of others to a theatrical performance. He saw that the humanized self may be just an animal driven by capricious emotions and vagaries of energy, but as a social character, it must remain relatively stable when performing in front of the audience. According to this theory, society is the theater, and individuals perform to guide and control the impressions of others on themselves— in popular terms, "impression management." However, the tone does not allow us to beautify and highlight our image through daily performances, presenting some kind of appropriate performance. Even if we have the desire to perform, we don't know when and where the content of life will enter the flow, and we don't know when and where we need to perform. On the one hand, the urgency and cruelty of the virus suppress the performance, on the other hand, no one can predict and prevent themselves from entering the flow in the non-performance state.
In contrast, the tone offers a kind of unwashed zero-degree writing, where there is only time, space, and yourself. No wonder some netizens have begun to worry about what it would be like if they were infected with the new crown - "If I announce the stream, my itinerary will be too bitter", "In order not to publish the stream, I will pay attention to it"...
The scenes in the flow contain extremely rich narratives, and the places where a person passes and the corresponding behaviors are superimposed, as if a script that has yet to be completed is more evocative. "The scene is in an area that expresses the atmosphere, the emotion, the emotion, and the atmosphere you identify with." In The Scene: How Spatial Qualities Shape Social Life, authors Daniel Aaron Searle, associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, and Terry Nichols Clarke, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, write. Scenes resonate with people, and a stranger's work and family situation, spending power, and even eating preferences and hobbies can be identified from the superposition of scenes.
"Scenes: How Spatial Quality Shapes Social Life"
[Plus] Daniel Aaron Sear / [Beauty] Terry Nichols Clark Qi Shuyu Wu Jun Translation
Square inch | Social Sciences Academic Press, 2019-1
All public spaces are not just spaces, everyone in the tone has entered more than one scene, all of these spaces are related to each other, each scene has "said" a lot, there are similarities, and they are also coherent, continuously superimposed, and complementary. The scenes we've been to are connected to each other, outlining our true state of being, and the answer to "who am I?" is about to come out.
Resources:
"The Moment of Epiphany" Zhang Yueran Beijing United Publishing Company 2020
"Body, Space and Postmodernity" Wang Min'an Nanjing University Press, Watchmen 2022-1-1
"Self-Presentation in Daily Life" by Owen Goffman, translated by Feng Gang, Peking University Press, 2016-5-16
"Scene: How Spatial Quality Shapes Social Life" [Plus] Daniel Aaron Sear [Beauty] Terry Nichols Clark Qi Shuyu Wu Jun Translation Fang Inch | Social Sciences Academic Press, 2019-1
Uniforms and voyeurism at comic shows: Is it that girls are morally illogical, or are men secretly filming wrong? https://m.jiemian.com/article/4757691.html