The advertisement placed by Douban in the WeChat circle of friends must have ignited a deep literary and artistic complex for bean friends. Friends who are familiar with Abei and Douban will say the theme of "our spiritual corner", like Abei. However, is this so?
Douban's first promotional film "Our Spiritual Corner"
Some bean friends commented: "This is douban, which reflects the voice of bean friends." ”
Non-bean friends commented: "This is the story of a mentally ill person who was arrested in the hospital and ran out. ”
As the voiceover in the film says, "We are free and eager to communicate, but we don't demand empathy." ”
"Our Spiritual Corner", what is this film trying to express?
Douban revealed:
"We try to take you into a fable story through a picture and expression of video poetry. In this story, you and I may be the protagonists of the story, and because of this, we took a subjective perspective to shoot this film.
Imagine that we are watching a book, or a movie, or listening to a beautiful piece of music, through which we enter a world of our imagination, in which we experience war, experience love, return to childhood, return to the arms of our mother, and also experience adolescence, and all that we experience in the imaginary world may be related to our past experiences and experiences, and some have nothing to do with them; we feel joy, sadness, anger, depression, warmth, excitement, but perhaps these emotions do not happen for ourselves.
We are going through a spiritual journey — perhaps we embrace the world and are held tightly by it — but fortunately, we still have free souls.
This free soul can allow us to imagine freely, to feel wantonly, without needing money and leisure to travel around the world, but to be able to travel freely in the most difficult time and space, and this kind of travel is the highest value of spiritual life.
Through the free soul, we understand and feel all the sadness and cruelty that has happened to us, or even if it has not happened to us, and we are so calm and objective that we are at ease.
When we want to embrace it, when we want to break free of it, we always have a corner where we can objectively read it and monitor it, and that is our spiritual corner. We hope this is the meaning of Douban for everyone. ”
Why did Douban choose to speak out at this time?
"Douban has always wanted to play the role of a platform from the beginning of its establishment, we set up a stage, and users perform on it. As a platform, there should be no style or attributes, it should be neutral enough, objective, can accommodate various styles of people and things, so in the past 10 years we rarely jump out to say what we are, but as far as possible to do a good job of the product - that is, to build the platform well.
What is Douban, in fact, in the eyes of every user is not the same, which is the characteristic of Douban as a platform. There is no doubt that there are a large number of people with strong creative desire and writing skills, who continue to create in Douban, and finally many have been adapted into movies or even won professional awards, and some have been published into books.
Therefore, many times when people mention Douban, they tend to think that there is a large number of literary and artistic youth gathered here. But in fact, users who really use Douban will know that there are not only literary and artistic youth here, but also "ordinary youth", who live in Douban very ordinary and seriously.
They use Douban to check the reviews and decide what movies to watch at night; they soak in the group to talk about gossip, talk about what jobs to find after graduation, and talk about how to decorate the house; they may not be professional food critics, but they will also run all over the city to eat the best eel rice; and finally they find a house in Douban, find a job, and even find their other half. As the promo goes: Except for a little secret, I'm just an extremely ordinary person.
Careful observation, every ordinary person at a certain moment/side of life will reveal a literary and artistic side, or we prefer to express it as a "pursuing" side.
Whether it's a bowl of delicious eel rice, a cup with a special pattern, or a standard yoga action, a fancy pancake gesture. This side is usually not easy to reveal in daily life, or there is no suitable opportunity to reveal, at this time Douban is a suitable platform, where you can easily find another or another group of eel rice lovers. 10 years later, when Douban now has more than 130 million registered users, we feel it is time to talk about what kind of place Douban is. ”
Abei and Douban
According to Douban, this film has nothing to do with Abei personally, but Abei, as the founder of Douban, I still want to talk about Abei.
Ten years ago, every morning, this former physics senior student at Tsinghua University and a ph.D. from the University of California would carry an Apple notebook that had been used for three years and had cracked paint to Starbucks near Douban Hutong in Beijing's Chaoyang District to "go to work." This is also the origin of the name Douban.
As a science and engineering man with idealism and geek spirit, Ah Bei made a slightly niche literary and art social networking site such as Douban. Even in the context of the rapid development of the Internet, peers are constantly making changes to adapt to the development needs of users, and Abei still adheres to his own style.
If Baidu and Douban are Internet companies with technical genes, Ah Bei and Robin Li both have the experience of studying abroad and returning to China to start a business, but the two of them have taken a completely different route, Baidu has the development of the wolf spirit, and Ah Bei has been in his spiritual corner to continue to indulge.
It's hard to interpret whether douban changes or doesn't change, like Shakespeare's classic line: "To be or not to be, this is a question." The slogan at the end of the film tells us the answer, our spiritual corner.
Wang Xiaobo said: "It is not enough for a person to have only this life and this life, he should also have a poetic world." Why not open a book, watch a movie, or listen to a song so simply that you can enter another, freer, wider world? ”
This article is written by Zhai Ziyao, WeChat: 787272060. Editor-in-chief of Speedway.com, columnist of Today's Headlines, Sohu Self-Media and so on. Committed to Internet analysis and commentary, feature article planning, character interview reports, etc., Baidu authors are welcome to a series of related articles. Sina Weibo @ Zhai Ziyao, welcome to exchange.