Zhou Ruiming, host, researcher of the "100 Talents Program" of the School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University
Chen Di Guest of Dialogue: Ph.D. Candidate, School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University
Wang Xi is a reporter of the all-media news center of Guizhou Radio and Television Station, and a member of the 10th "Outstanding Reporter" Resident Program of Zhejiang University
Zhou Ruiming: For front-line news practitioners and researchers, if they don't know the current hot Internet memes, they won't use one or two hot stalks to embellish and "package" themselves, I'm afraid it will be "properly dropped" and "out". The ubiquitous use of memes makes socializing fun and fun. The mainstream media also often carries hot memes in their reports. Proponents believe that this shortens the distance between users and shows the image of "down-to-earth", but another voice believes that the strange expressions of some Internet hot memes have broken the traditional norms of modern Chinese, weakened the creativity and richness of the language, and even eaten away at the language norms and literacy of journalists.
First of all, I would like to ask Wang Xi: How do you understand the practice of "grounding"? In your opinion, what kind of image should the mainstream media play in its communication activities to the general public?
Wang Xi: When it comes to the mainstream media's "down-to-earthness", I think of the Olympics report that our station did not long ago. At the Paris Olympics, Xie Yu, a shooter from Bijie, Guizhou, won the gold medal in the men's 10m air pistol, which attracted a lot of attention. When following up on this report, our focus is not on the traditional TV port, but on the most classic pictures and clips on the Internet and short video platforms, and produced more than 40 short videos such as Xie Yu trotting to bring water to reporters, bringing gold medals to reporters to experience, and wanting to go to Fanjing Mountain, with more than 200 million views on the video account and Douyin, and more than 10 pieces of content on the Douyin hot list. Many netizens commented that who doesn't love interesting champions?
I think this is a reflection of why the mainstream media must be "down-to-earth". In March this year, the China Internet Network Information Center released the 53rd "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network". According to the report, as of December 2023, there are 1.092 billion netizens in mainland China, of which 1.053 billion are short video users, accounting for 96.4% of the total number of netizens. This huge group is also influencing the agenda setting of the media, and we can better promote the main theme and play the role of the mainstream media in guiding public opinion by entering the short video platform with PGC content production.
When it comes to what kind of image the mainstream media should play in the communication activities for the public, we have to mention the phenomenal communication of "village BA" in Guizhou. Our Taiwan and "Village BA" are a pair of old friends who have known each other since childhood. The relationship between "Village BA" and Guizhou TV is not only a reporting relationship, but a partnership that empowers each other and grows together. We have turned one-way communication into two-way in-depth interaction, from passive reporting and recording at the beginning, to active planning and participation, we have worked with "Village BA" to create stars, create hot characters and topics, and dig out character stories and off-site stories that continue to attract attention.
In this process, we not only create our own content, but also distribute it, building a multi-level discourse system. Our station's "People's Concern" is the only news media with the right to broadcast the "Village BA" live broadcast, and we sent a live broadcast team to broadcast the "Village BA" semi-finals and finals throughout the whole process, generating live broadcast signals and outputting them to the whole network, and linking more than 50 live broadcast platforms across the country to follow up the live broadcast. We will provide ultra-long live broadcasts to major media, and the content will continue to be open and supplied, so that media peers can be more active in the "Village BA" communication, and the content we provide will have more possibilities for secondary creation.
From producers to content providers, our image of communication to the masses is constantly changing. In the mass communication, how to better communicate, in fact, there is no precedent to follow, only in combination with reality, grasp the opportunity, in order to get more audience recognition.
Zhou Ruiming: Chen Di, you have been paying attention to audience research for a long time, what do you think of the mainstream media's attempt to be "down-to-earth"?
Chen Di: Actually, "grounding" is a normative requirement in Chinese journalism. Whether it is the "mass line" in the context of Chinese politics or the "three closeness" principle that the media needs to follow as a "mouthpiece", they all indicate the direction of action that is in line with the lives of the general public. The Award Office of the China Journalists Association mentioned in the "Report on the Winning Works of the 27th China Journalism Awards" that "news must have a wide audience, it must be easy to understand, take the initiative to use the language of the masses, and return to real life." This demand has been perpetuated, and it has become the default common sense of journalists.
Today, this normative requirement is being noticed and discussed in the metaphor of "grounding", which is actually a discourse on the crisis of journalism. Just over a decade ago, the mainstream media was still the main information channel in people's lives, and it was naturally bound to "local qi". It is in this premise that we usually discuss the professional norms and social functions of journalism. However, in the past decade, the development of online communication and self-media industry has diluted the attention of the audience that the mainstream media once gathered or even monopolized, and at the same time, the trend of information dissemination has become more and more intense. As a result, the preconditions for the mainstream media to be bound to "local atmosphere" have been loosened, and the mainstream media has begun to face competition for the attention of the audience, and industry experts and scholars have also focused more on how the media "accesses" the audience. The discussion of these return prerequisites shows the passive and reluctant "transformation" of the current mainstream media in communication practice.
The change in the communication landscape is permanent, and we are not going back to the past. Nowadays, social media occupies people's fragmented time under the algorithm recommendation mechanism, and the number of visits to self-media can also be comparable to that of mainstream media. This situation may provide a stimulus for mainstream media to reflect on their own operations, so we are more and more frequently discovering "down-to-earth" news practices in mainstream media, such as the Internet memes we are talking about today. These practices are in line with the changing trends in the news industry today. If journalism needs to protect the public interest, it must not stop at the level of self-talk, but must find ways to maintain communication with the ever-changing public, and this communicability should be the essence of "down-to-earth". First of all, we should applaud the efforts of the mainstream media to be "down-to-earth", which did not immerse themselves in the advantages of past communication, but tried to cope with the competitive needs of the communication environment.
Specifically, when it comes to Internet hot memes, its most distinctive communication effect is to create a lively image and entertainment atmosphere, so that the article is close to the latest or even real-time Internet discussion hotspots. To borrow a vocabulary of new media operation, it can be said that the use of Internet hot memes has improved the "network sense" of the article. The word "network sense" actually removes a mask of "down-to-earthness", because the audience they cover is not the same, and "network sense" is at most just a translation of "grounding" in digital life. Despite China's high internet penetration, there are still many differences between the demographic profile of active netizens and the overall public, and frequently updated Internet memes are more likely to be circulated among the "Generation Z" subculture. Therefore, when the mainstream media pursues "network sense", the "local atmosphere" they receive is not necessarily the so-called "wide audience" that is internally heterogeneous, but more likely to be a relatively homogeneous but perhaps large number of specific groups of netizens. Of course, this needs to be checked by obtaining a large amount of media background data. However, starting from the principle of the publicness of the media, we have reason to further explore: is the audience imagined and expected by the mainstream media homogeneous and younger? How does the media's audience imagination and back-end user portrait affect the production of "network sense" articles? Netizens are not equal to the public, and Internet memes do not necessarily have public significance, and these differences need to be constantly distinguished by the media when playing a public role.
Zhou Ruiming: Does the expression of Internet memes weaken the language itself?
Wang Xi: I think that hot words are actually a manifestation of hot memes, which are highly condensed in our lives in the past, and are also a concentrated reflection of what people care about the most, and their expression will not weaken the language itself. An era has the characteristics of an era, an era has an expression of an era, and if you want to understand this era, I think it is a very good choice to look at the hot words of the year. In 2023, the top ten popular words of "Biting and Chewing Words", Guizhou's original hot word "Village Chao" was selected. The highest attendance in a single game exceeded 60,000, and the whole network was viewed more than 48 billion times, setting a historical record for various data. "Biting the Text and Chewing the Words" believes that the "village super" shines, and the rural sports events with the prefix "village" are popular, which has far-reaching practical significance for promoting national fitness, achieving a well-off life in an all-round way, and revitalizing the rural economy.
The reason why Internet memes can become popular in the online world is precisely because it is a mirror to observe reality, providing us with a channel to salvage social mentality and a window to capture social changes. For the media, we will appropriately select new words on the Internet according to the attributes of each content platform, which can not only nourish the content and enrich the report, remove the official tone and be down-to-earth, but also reach a tacit understanding with readers, improve communication efficiency, and achieve resonance.
Zhou Ruiming: In other words, will Internet memes converge on the complexity of language? Will our thesaurus become uniform and barren?
Di Chen: The answer to this question is actually quite open, depending on what characteristics of online memes we pay attention to. Internet memes have both creative and anti-normative aspects, which can be regarded as a kind of language application innovation and enrichment of language; But at the same time, we will also find signs of formulaicization (such as "XX assassin") and circleization (such as various "memes") in the development of hot online memes.
Personally, I don't think it's necessary to worry about the impact that internet memes may have on language development. First of all, Internet memes are not exactly a new phenomenon, in the pre-Internet era, folk oral buzzwords are one of the corresponding expressions. Going back further, the afterword, also known as the quips, is also a form of language created by people in their daily lives, and many of the sentences that have been handed down use homophonic rhetoric - isn't this also a common rhetorical device (such as "bolt Q") in the current Internet memes? Therefore, from a general point of view, the popularity of certain forms of language has always been happening, and the expression of the current Internet meme is only a formal transformation and continuation, and I don't think there is anything special about it that is enough to constitute a resistance to the development of language or form any kind of threat.
Moreover, if we place the phenomenon of Internet memes in the process of (digital) technology-social evolution, we will find that it is only a small partial landscape in the communication scene of human society after digital technology empowers the public. People will have different ways of talking in online and offline interpersonal/group communication and human-computer interaction; There are also differences in the style of language applications in BBS, blogs, Weibo and WeChat; Punctuation, text, pictures, memes, voices, videos, and their combinations can convey an infinite variety of linguistic meanings...... These massive, multimodal digital practices are applying, updating, and creating the content and form of language, and Internet memes are just one of the products. If human language is indeed in the midst of some kind of essential change, digital technology is a more likely reason to explore, and Internet memes are just one example of this possibility.
Zhou Ruiming: So in the face of the current digital media ecology, what kind of language use norms should journalists uphold? Wang Xi, what experience do you have to share?
Wang Xi: This year marks my 10th year as a journalist. For ten years, I have been working in Guizhou Radio and Television and received training in the radio and television language system. With the advent of the digital media ecosystem, I found that it has many similarities with the radio and television language system. Radio and television language requires concise words, short sentences, and as colloquial as possible in language expression, reducing written language, which are also characteristics of Internet language. The language of the Internet pursues concise and clear expressions, and uses short words and sentences to express meaning, which makes the transmission of information faster and more efficient. In addition to immediacy, Internet communication is very interactive, and netizens seek synchronous interaction when communicating, which requires that the language be as natural as possible in spoken rather than written.
Therefore, in the face of the current digital media ecology, I still choose to use radio and television language specifications to convey information to the audience objectively, clearly and concisely, and at the same time, we will also appropriately choose online terms to use. The mainstream media is responsible for the important mission of "guiding the society, influencing public opinion, promoting righteousness, and uniting people's hearts", and we will face up, screen, and make good use of the network language, enhance the interaction between the mainstream media and the audience, and improve the audience's participation, so as to achieve good communication results.
Zhou Ruiming: Chen Di, in your opinion, in today's popular Internet memes, what kind of language practice norms should journalists uphold while being "down-to-earth"?
Di Chen: I'd like to be picky about the word "norm", although it can be conventional, but often we expect a norm to be written in plain text and have (maybe top-down) enforcement. Journalists are already in a lot of structural constraints, so I think it's important to carefully consider whether there needs to be a new "norm" for their use of language. Therefore, I think it would be more appropriate to talk about "literacy" on this topic. Correspondingly, we must also face the reality that literacy is difficult to frame and itemize.
Based on this, we can turn the question into how journalists should select and use memes. In relation to the public nature of the media mentioned earlier, since journalists are determined to maintain this publicity, they need to consider: which Internet memes are of public significance? What types of manuscripts are hot memes suitable for? Who is the audience that the manuscript that incorporates the meme wants to promote communication? However, these problems involve both public value judgments and specific writing decisions, and it is difficult to construct a clear guidance to solve the problem, and I can only think on paper that these reflections on public nature and the imagination of the audience/readers may help journalists to write more prudently in public writing.
Source: Media Review
Edited by Feng Luyu
Second instance Zeng Min
The third trial Chen issued a document