When an ordinary person is selected by traffic

Introduction: In the Internet age, "Internet celebrities" are regarded as the luckiest group of people. However, under the high-return traffic network, some people use it as a trampoline to achieve soaring, while others are ruthlessly entangled and discarded. The author peeks into the cruel double-sided nature of it and points out the importance of supervision.

On the Chinese Internet, there are always new cases of ordinary people becoming famous quickly because they hit the right traffic code. With the increase of network bandwidth, people's attention has shifted from text and pictures to videos. Ordinary people are becoming famous faster and faster, and the value of traffic has also been redefined.

In fact, there are only a few people who can "change their fate" by relying on sudden traffic, and more "people chosen by traffic" have become an outdated topic of conversation on the Internet. In today's Internet environment where traffic is the lifeblood of business, users' blind obedience and numbness have gradually become a curse under the guidance of the platform, making people who are good at manipulating traffic rich and causing trouble for more ordinary people who have no intention of becoming the focus of public attention.

01 The “lucky ones” chosen by traffic

Artist Andy Warhol once "predicted" that everyone could become famous within 15 minutes. But Andy Warhol, who passed away in 1987, probably didn't expect that the advent of the Internet is shortening the time it takes for ordinary people to become famous.

In 2004, with the help of portal websites, Sister Furong quickly became famous just by posting a few photos of herself showing her confident demeanor and exaggerated movements on the forum, becoming the "first Internet celebrity". Facing all kinds of ridicule on the Internet, Sister Furong did not take it seriously, and even the more netizens scolded her, the more active she became.

In the following years, Sister Furong released her own original singles, served as a network program host, and participated in dramas and movies. Today, Sister Furong's fame is a typical example of "black red", because her popularity is almost entirely due to being ridiculed by netizens, but this does not prevent her from achieving career success. When she appeared in public recently, Sister Furong was already a successful entrepreneur, and she was completely different from the flamboyant Internet celebrity.

In the era of social media, interactive functions such as commenting, liking, and forwarding provide people with equal and efficient communication opportunities. Li Ziqi, Papi Jiang and other "second-generation Internet celebrities" have gained a large number of fans with their differentiated content features and quickly realized commercial value. Papi Jiang's video account was only updated for one year, but it sold its first patch advertisement at an auction price of 22 million yuan. Li Ziqi, who has the same path to fame, is rumored to have an annual income of up to 168 million yuan.

At a time when short videos and live broadcasts dominate the traffic, the path from an ordinary person to an Internet celebrity has become short enough. In 2018, a 10-second "social shake" short video recorded in an underground parking lot made Wen Wan the "originator of Douyin Internet celebrities" overnight. Since then, Shen Wei, who was accidentally "discovered", did not even have to do it himself. He became a "wandering master" step by step with the help of netizens' cameras, and has a net worth of 2 million through live broadcasts and personal websites.

The benefits of being selected by traffic are not only deeply felt by ordinary people, but also by celebrities. Last year, Liu Genghong and Wang Xinling became popular again. The former gained 3 to 4 million fans in a single day and gained more than 70 million fans in 2 months, completing the transformation from a "past male artist" to a top anchor; the latter returned to the ranks of first-line stars at the age of 40, and the advertising endorsement fee also tripled from 1 million to 3 million.

From the above brief history of the development of Chinese Internet celebrities, we can see that those who are chosen by traffic are the lucky ones of the times, and all of them have reached the pinnacle of life with the help of traffic. But as onlookers, we can also clearly realize that compared with the era when Sister Furong became famous by "making a fool of herself", ordinary people can no longer achieve fame by themselves.

02 Two-way selection of individuals and traffic

In the pursuit of traffic, there are indeed some people who are born with a keen sense of traffic.

Good dancers like Mimi Meng draw materials from the various difficulties encountered by women in real life, cater to the emotional needs of the "weak", and use concise, humorous and slightly unconventional language to grasp the readers' emotional G-spots and gain millions of fans.

Its exploration of the pain points and weaknesses of human nature hit the mark for the female group, so Mi Meng captured traffic by becoming an outlet for the group's emotions. Although Mi Meng's self-media account was later suspended and the team was disbanded due to public doubts and condemnations on the authenticity of its content, this means of capturing traffic has not disappeared.

In March this year, Mi Meng was exposed to have "resurrected" on the short video platform. The four short video accounts of its MCN still use emotional traffic as a routine, focusing on the market of young women and young people in small towns , and the number of fans has exceeded 70 million . "Mimeng Manufacturing", which has torn off the label of false creation and directly presented fictional plots, has achieved greater success. This reflects the user demand for this kind of emotional content. The stable traffic brought by the supply and demand relationship between users and content also caters to the interests of the platform. However, compared with a few people like Mi Meng who can capture traffic and benefit from it, more ordinary people who accidentally became popular are just short-lived topics of conversation in the Internet wave.

In 2014, Pang Mailang's "My Skateboard Shoes" became a phenomenal song of that year. Unfortunately, after gaining traffic, Pang Mailang did not really succeed, but became a victim of the traffic era. After becoming famous, Pang Mailang was immersed in the illusion of being an "international singer", but at the same time he resisted commercial performances because he had no new works and his live singing level was worrying. The agency spent millions to package "My Skateboard Shoes", but Pang Mailang did not have the copyright. He himself realized that the company created him just to earn traffic and realize the realization. Under the pressure of unrealistic music dreams and the agency's commercial purposes, Pang Mailang chose to flee, and therefore faced huge claims.

In 2021, Pang Mailang was noticed by the public again because he was sent to a mental hospital due to severe schizophrenia. A few months later, Pang Mailang was found singing and selling goods in the live broadcast room. The scene where his assistant was holding back laughter because of his unpleasant singing unexpectedly became a new hot spot. Pang Mailang never thought that he would still be treated as a "clown" and made fun of and entertained after his public appearance 7 years later.

Outside the live broadcast room, there are more people who want to be "Pang Mailang" and cast envious eyes. However, unlike Mi Meng who knows how to control traffic, and Pang Mailang who is hyped by the brokerage company, ordinary people who do not have the ability to control traffic will not escape the tragic ending even if they are accidentally "hit" by traffic.

Just like the "koi girl Xin Xiaodai", who received unprecedented attention because of winning the "100 million grand prize" on Weibo. After quitting her job as an IT engineer and spending more than 200,000 yuan in savings to redeem the prize, Xin Xiaodai chose to switch to live streaming to sell goods. In the live streaming industry where celebrities' live streaming sales are always a flop, the "koi" who changed careers halfway did not have a smooth journey. Not only was the popularity of the live streaming room mediocre, but she was also criticized by netizens for selling counterfeit products. It has been 4 years since she won the prize. The former Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate and IT engineer is now penniless and jobless.

"Xin Xiaodai" is not an isolated case, but at least he is lucky. At a time when "it is difficult for poor families to produce noble children", there are more people who want to become famous overnight and join the battlefield for traffic. They are extremely brave but also covered with scars.

The Northeast anchors who were ridiculed for using live broadcasts to revitalize the old industrial base once seized the high ground of short video and live broadcast content traffic by shouting, flower hands and social shaking, but few of them succeeded. Many people may not know that after bringing "cultural superiority" to the audience and satisfying the bad tastes of platform users, they are labeled as vulgar content and drowned in tens of thousands of live broadcast rooms every day. They seem to have chosen the path of chasing traffic, but they have also been waiting to be chosen by traffic.

03 The lack of "gatekeepers" has caused traffic to backstab ordinary people

In the eyes of outsiders, being chosen by traffic means becoming an Internet celebrity and rising to prominence, but ordinary people, after becoming unexpectedly famous, may not only fail to achieve overnight fame, but also have their original life rhythm disrupted.

Last August, "Sugar Soup Grandpa", who sold sugar water on the streets of Wuhan, became a hot topic because he sold sugar water for 2 yuan per cup with unlimited refills. At first, the focus of public opinion was that the old man had not raised the price of sugar water for 17 years, but then comments on related news began to question food hygiene and personal attacks on the old man, and even rumors spread that the old man sold sugar water because his descendants were unfilial and had no one to rely on. Later, in order to resume a peaceful life, "Sugar Soup Grandpa" was forced to give up the sugar water business and stop selling it.

The same problem also occurred with the recently popular "Wa Ya Wa Female Kindergarten Teacher". Since the female teacher was not the original author of the "Wa Ya Wa" work, some netizens accused her of riding on the popularity of other bloggers, and some netizens provoked confrontation between several bloggers who posted the same content at the same time, causing "Wa Ya Wa Female Kindergarten Teacher" to be attacked personally. After the live broadcast gained millions of fans, rumors about the female teacher leaving her job and signing a contract with a live broadcast company also began to spread.

The above two incidents reflect that under the dissemination mechanism of the Internet, people have limited understanding of the facts and a narrow understanding of the characters in the incidents. People are eager to understand and pay attention to the world and others through the Internet, but they lack the necessary concern for the truth of things. They often use their narrow understanding and unwarranted speculation to inflict verbal violence on others. Ordinary people who originally just wanted to record their lives have lost their stable lives because they were selected by traffic. This phenomenon has become an accident that may happen to everyone in the Internet age.

Frankly speaking, traffic, as a concrete manifestation of value transfer in the Internet communication environment, deserves attention. The AIDMA classic model of consumer behavior tells us that attracting consumers' attention is the beginning of promoting consumer behavior. On the Internet, various content platforms have potential commercial value because they carry the attention of a large number of users.

However, there are many ways to attract attention, and humans are naturally more interested in novel, emotional, and exaggerated content. Therefore, in the absence of proper guidance, supervision, and industry norms, it is possible to harvest traffic with inferior content.

The "gatekeeper theory" in communication studies shows that when the media disseminates information, there will be a "gatekeeper" role to filter and screen the information, and only pass on content that is in line with the audience's values ​​and interests. In the past, news media with social responsibilities were their own "gatekeepers", and the scale and orientation of information screening were often positive. However, in the competition between platforms and users for traffic, the guidance of positive values ​​may be selectively ignored, and the pursuit of maximizing benefits has become a higher priority development goal.

At the end of the 19th century, the "yellow journalism war" broke out in the Western news industry. In order to cater to the public's bad taste, a large amount of emotional, exaggerated, and even fictitious news content polluted the public communication environment. In the Internet communication environment, in addition to the media and the audience, the platform, as a channel and scene for receiving network traffic, also has a strong demand for traffic and motivation for hype.

In the era of chasing traffic, platforms often use quantitative targets to motivate content production. However, due to the fragmented reading habits of Internet users and their emotional and curious content preferences, the authenticity and quality of content cannot be simply quantified, and individuals are easily led astray by the platform mechanism. Not only that, the platform will also dig out and create new hot spots from the user content pool and feed them to users, but users do not have the right to refuse to be selected by traffic.

In the context of the Internet where traffic thinking guides content production, the frequent "hot searches" and "Internet celebrities" are not entirely based on the subjective will of users. There are also traffic baits that platforms and "Mimeng" throw at ordinary people. To avoid this phenomenon, everyone needs to be their own "gatekeeper" and consciously reduce their interest in low-quality content.

However, in an environment where there are fewer and fewer rational onlookers, positive individual expressions often fall into a spiral of silence, and negative preferences take the initiative in the market. Therefore, those who are selected by traffic have the opportunity to become famous overnight, but also the risk of becoming a flash in the pan on the Internet, or even being subjected to cyberbullying.

If this continues, one day people will realize that in the traffic game controlled by the platform, the people who are selected by the traffic are also machines that produce traffic. The lack of "gatekeepers" may cause users to lose their ability to judge value under the feeding of "yellow news" and mindless hot topics.

When "becoming famous" means the possibility of being cyberbullied and emotional short videos become the code to gain traffic, the audience should perhaps start thinking about whether the ending of being chosen by traffic is really as good as imagined?

Author: Xiaoman

Source: WeChat public account: "Jingzhe Research Institute (ID:jingzheyanjiusuo)"