If you tell young people today that the main purpose of mobile phones is to make phone calls, they will think you are joking. Nowadays, mobile phones have become the external body organs of young people, and even computers are regarded as traditional media by young people, not to mention TV.
In just one or two years, the rapid rise of short videos has made young people who are highly dependent on mobile phones more "never leave their hands and don’t look up". According to the reporter’s interview for half a month, hundreds of millions of young people linger on Aauto Quicker, Tik Tok and Bili Bili (referred to as bilibili for short) every day, which reflects the profound changes brought by technological development and social needs to the way young people obtain information.
What to "brush" on the short video platform?
Short video is a new way of mobile Internet content dissemination, which generally refers to videos with a duration of less than 5 minutes. Most short videos of mobile application software are shorter than 1 minute or even 15 seconds.
In the past one or two years, short videos have become the "explosion point" of the information industry. According to the 2017 cmnet Annual Report, Aauto Quicker, Tik Tok and bilibili are among the top three favorite netizens born after 1990s. Due to its high interactivity and interest, short videos spread rapidly among young people.
Internet industry data shows that Aauto Quicker was founded in 2013 and currently has more than 120 million daily active users; The vibrato short video under today’s headline was founded in 2017. It was the first software downloaded by Apple’s mobile phone in the first quarter of 2018, with more than 150 million daily active users. In February of this year, the daily active users of bilibili’s applications also reached 21.98 million. In addition, applications such as pear video and beauty shoot also have huge users.
The reporter found that rich and varied short video content can easily attract the attention of young people:
-short video of funny songs and dances. This kind of short video uses a well-known pop music as the soundtrack, and the publisher dubs it himself, or dances a "social shake" in public places (a dance form popular in the ballroom in the early years, which has re-emerged in the short video platform in recent years) to create a funny atmosphere. This kind of short video takes the topic of "seaweed dance" in Tik Tok as an example. In a short time, 80,000 users recorded and uploaded related videos, many of which have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.
-Short video of current events. In this kind of short video, the video publisher is often at the scene, showing the scene of sudden hot events in the form of video, while dubbing himself. This kind of short video can visually show the news scene, and it is very simple to make and publish, and often has the effect of "viral transmission".
-short video of life story. Most of these short videos are performed by "blue-collar" groups, which are used to show the daily work and life of different professionals. For example, in Aauto Quicker, farmers can often be seen picking fruits, electric workers climbing the power grid, and chefs teaching cooking. There are also video publishers who design some plots, such as sudden marriage proposals, to stimulate the audience to resonate. But at the same time, such short videos have frequently appeared illegal and illegal contents such as hunting wild animals and doing vulgar actions in public places.
"Life is less if you don’t watch short videos."
Xinhua News Agency’s questionnaire survey of 12,000 young people across the country shows that short videos have become one of the favorite forms of information acquisition for young people. For example, the questionnaire survey of Beilun Vocational High School in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province shows that 41% of students like to get information through video, which is much higher than words, pictures and audio.
Experts, scholars and young workers believe that "post-90s", as "aborigines" in the Internet age, are their basic needs for information, and short videos just perfectly meet this demand. Rui Chen, chairman of bilibili, said that in order to get the qualification to upload videos in bilibili, you need to answer 100 test questions related to management norms and values, but 31.6 million users still passed this test, which shows how strong the demand for interaction among young users is.
Short videos can attract young people through novel expressions and interactive experiences within 15 seconds, which is also the embodiment of technological innovation. Ceng Guangming, chief content officer of Aauto Quicker, believes that the rise of short video applications seems to originate from the youth entertainment culture, and its essence is the rapid development of video technology and streaming media technology. With the technological innovations such as 5G, short video is likely to become the main information channel for the post-90s and post-00s.
Li Ling, an associate professor at the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science of East China Normal University, believes that the reason why short videos attract young people is that the video itself is a form of easily accepting knowledge, and on the other hand, the curiosity of young people about "taboo content" such as sex and vulgarity is expanded by algorithms. If you only click on the beauty theme video when watching the video, the system will recommend more and more beauty videos according to the preference demand, which will easily make viewers indulge in it.
Mainstream information channels need to improve their innovation ability
In order to win the youth.
Nowadays, "poisoning" in Tik Tok has become a buzzword among young people. The interviewed experts suggested that it is necessary to improve the effective supervision of short video platforms so that they can play an active role in the growth of young people. At the same time, mainstream information dissemination channels should also learn and make good use of new forms of communication such as short videos to ensure that positive energy is transmitted to the hearts of young people.
Lian Si, deputy director of the Central School Department of the Communist Youth League, believes that short video applications such as Tik Tok meet the needs of young people to express and show themselves, giving them "spiritual enjoyment", which will resonate among users and bring spontaneous communication. However, it does not rule out that the algorithm recommendation mechanism caters to the vulgar or even vulgar content needs of some young people, which intensifies the "narrowing" of their reading content and has certain hidden dangers. It is necessary to improve the technical level from the source so that new technologies, including artificial intelligence algorithms, can better serve the public.
The popularity of short video software is also related to the lack of innovative ability and communication ability of some mainstream media content.
Su Junbin, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University, said that many traditional media unilaterally emphasized the construction of "two micro-ends" (Weibo, WeChat, and client) in the process of transforming to new media positions, and in essence, some still moved the contents previously published in paper media to new media channels intact, which had no practical effect on attracting young audiences. "The party’s ideas, government decisions and other information need to be interpreted, and it needs to be conveyed in new ways such as short videos to attract young audiences."
The mainstream media should quickly adapt to the influence of new things on the way of communication, make beneficial adjustments in line with the times, and actively change the way of content communication, including "hard news", so that the mainstream voice will become the information that teenagers are willing to take the initiative to accept. At present, some young workers have made fruitful explorations. For example, the official account of "Qingwei Studio" of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League in Tik Tok has gained nearly 900,000 fans and more than 14 million likes from its establishment in March to the end of April.
Hu Baijing, dean of the School of Journalism, Renmin University of China, believes that under the background of the irreversible trend of video-based information acquisition for youth groups, it will play an incalculable practical role in the construction of "future positions" for mainstream media to fully learn the voice expression of the current short video platform. (Reporter Wu Zhendong, Yan Zhihong, Yu Jingjing, Wu Xiaoying)
