Text ｜ Shi Anshu
Editor's note
On June 30, the summer practice team of the School of Communication of East China Normal University came to Rongjiang County to visit and study in the "New Media Helping Rural Revitalization" Industrial Park. Before the popularity of "Cun Chao", Rongjiang County had already promoted the "Village Spokesperson", "Thousands of People Action, Ten Thousand People Plan" and other training projects through the three-level system of county-township/town-village, "incubated" more than 12,000 local self-media accounts, and designed a simple new media tutorial of "Rongyi Six Steps" to cultivate rural anchors. Rongjiang's new media practice does not blindly pursue top anchors, but is committed to cultivating a large number of small and medium-sized farmer anchors. As pointed out by the accompanying instructor Shi Anshu, this is a local and developing new media communication path outside the platform business logic. Its practice reveals a new possibility, "absorbing new media from the local life world, rather than the other way around, integrating the local life world from the logic of new media". The latter is exactly the logic of today's urban new media operation.
The secret behind the popularity of "Cun Chaomarket"
"Let mobile phones become new agricultural tools, let data become new agricultural materials, and let live broadcasting become new agricultural work". In a series of visits and research activities around "Cun Chaomarket" in Rongjiang, Guizhou, the most impressive are these three slogans on the streets of Rongjiang. From the perspective of media and communication, perhaps this is the deep-seated secret of the popularity of Guizhou's "Cun Chaomarket" in the past one or two years.
In our general experience, agricultural tools, agricultural materials and agricultural work are mainly related to "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", falling within the scope of traditional agricultural economy, and the relationship between them and new media and its economic form is very distant. We generally do not connect the two together without any intermediary. But in these three slogans, agricultural tools, agricultural materials, agricultural work and mobile phones, data, and live broadcasting have formed a strong and direct connection. Here, we can find that there is a practical and theoretical force at work.
Literally speaking, these three slogans are nothing more than expressing that farmers use mobile phones for live broadcasting, generate attention and traffic, drive tourism or sales of agricultural products (including handicrafts), and promote the growth of farmers' income. This is the simple logic. It seems that there is nothing special about it. Many rural farmers are doing it. The problem is that many farmers can watch short videos and live broadcasts unconsciously, but it is not easy for quite a number of local farmers to consciously and skillfully use their mobile phones to broadcast local culture, and other local farmers consciously like and forward to promote the growth of local traffic. This involves the cultivation of farmers' own new media awareness, or the conscious improvement of media literacy.
This problem was solved as early as before the "Cun Chao" went out of the circle in 2023. In 2021, the "Rongjiang County New Media to Help Rural Revitalization Industrial Park" was officially established, and the publicity and training of new media literacy in Rongjiang County was officially launched. For farmers and county residents in Rongjiang County, how to make them clearly understand what new media and its economic form are and what their significance is is not easy in itself. However, the connection between "mobile phone = farm tools", "data = agricultural materials", and "live broadcast = farm work" established by Rongjiang's new media publicity and training has intuitively allowed farmers to understand the distant from their own perspective. When they realize that mobile phones have similar functions to hoes, data has similar value to the funds for purchasing fertilizers, and live broadcast has the same labor attributes as working in the fields, farmers can instantly grasp the content and meaning of new media and its economic form from their living world, and they have a clearer understanding of the organic relationship between mobile phones, attention, live broadcasts and their daily work. This clear awareness and understanding is a true understanding, which is the improvement of media literacy.
Of course, the main purpose of the new media work team of this industrial park is to provide continuous and large-scale training on mobile phone use and live broadcasting for farmers in various villages, and then spread it out layer by layer, with experienced farmers teaching unskilled farmers. Slowly, more and more farmers - although some of them can't even read a few words - can use their mobile phones to send short videos and live broadcasts to varying degrees. This kind of new media training for farmers is of great significance. Its direct goal is of course to use live broadcasting to bring goods or tourism, promote farmers' income and county economic growth, but in the new media atmosphere slowly formed by specialized training institutions and "farmers teaching farmers", the overall new media quality of farmers has been improved. Generally, farmers know more about how to use mobile phones for communication, entertainment and information search, learn more about how to frame, forward and comment, know more about identifying whether new media content is deceptive, and are more adept at using mobile phones to express themselves and show themselves. They even have a clearer and clearer experience in the algorithms and traffic logic on which new media operate. —Don't underestimate the role of some simple knowledge and operation training. For urban intellectuals, it is easy to use and understand a button or a function icon, but for many middle-aged and elderly farmers and even the new generation of farmers, whether they can use this button or understand this function icon is sometimes the difference between being able to use a mobile phone and not being able to use a mobile phone! In this way, after a few years, mobile phones are no longer embedded in the lives of Rongjiang farmers in an inexplicable way, making them passively bear the changes brought by mobile phones. On the contrary, mobile phones have become more and more their tools, just like words are tools for intellectuals. The imagination of urban intellectual elites that grassroots farmers can only blankly brush the brainless short videos on Douyin and Kuaishou has actually been subverted.
When mobile phones, traffic and live broadcasts are not only used to bring goods, but also a truly organic part of the lives of ordinary farmers, the new media atmosphere of the whole county has been formed. According to local statistics, the key feature of this new media atmosphere is that it hardly relies on big Vs with millions of fans, but mainly relies on thousands of small anchors with 10,000 or 20,000 fans, as well as more local short video enthusiasts who have few fans but are willing to share. The general improvement of farmers' new media literacy, the network of mass short video production, sharing and dissemination, and the "Cun Chao" rooted in mass football complement each other. Under the support of the clear sports tourism strategy of the entire county, the foundation for the popularity of "Cun Chao" has actually been laid.
Compared with the commercial operation of buying traffic and creating hot products to go out of the circle, this basic and mass work is particularly worthy of attention. "Going out of the circle" actually means getting more attention from people "outside the circle", but if only a few people use commercial logic to create attention on the platform, then it will inevitably dissipate quickly in the ever-changing ocean of short videos, but Rongjiang County's new media practice hopes to take a local new media communication path outside the commercial logic of the platform. It relies on the active and collective dissemination of local life by every active and voluntary new and old farmer and county resident. In terms of "Cun Chao", the inter-village competition relationship formed by "Cun Chao" has stimulated the enthusiasm of every villager, prompting them to actively use new media to participate in a series of communication practice activities around "Cun Chao". Through the video shooting, sharing and dissemination of a large number of villagers, "Cun Chao" has accumulated a lot of traffic unknowingly. To achieve this kind of mass active dissemination, it is first of all due to the local government's continuous cultivation of the new media literacy of the whole people, the continuous guidance of the focus of dissemination, and the continuous support of mass cultural life. But more importantly, with the help of the government's catalyst, support and platform, more and more farmers have improved their media literacy, allowing new media to truly integrate into their daily lives, and making the new media economy truly an organic part of their economic life. Accompanying this process is that the hobby of a few people (football games) has become the culture of the majority ("Cun Chao" culture). From this point of view, Guizhou's "Cun Chao" is first a local media practice, and secondly it is a lasting media event.
It can be said that Rongjiang's mass new media practice attempts to organically integrate new media into the county economy and the farmers' life world, making it an integral part of their overall lifestyle, and strives to help farmers and "city dwellers" stand on the same media platform and have similar media literacy and media life. This is a media practice that truly has the potential for media democracy.
If we sublimate it a little, we can also say that it is Rongjiang's new media practice that reveals a logic of new media operation that is different from the highly capitalized new media operation in big cities. Simply put, the operation of new media in big cities is too trapped in the logic of capital, so that the operation logic of new media is highly consistent with the operation logic of capital. In a sense, this is the formation of platform capitalism. Therefore, the logic of new media that we understand can only be platform-oriented, data exploitation and traffic orientation. The result of its radicalization is that (consumption) mobile phones can replace (work) computers, data can replace wages, and live broadcasts can replace work. This logic of new media has deeply penetrated into big cities and has absorbed and integrated the urban life world to a large extent. However, the new media practice of the masses in Rongjiang has revealed a new possibility, that is, how to absorb new media from the local life world, rather than the other way around, integrating the local life world from the logic of new media. As the slogan "Let mobile phones become new agricultural tools, let data become new agricultural materials, and let live broadcasts become new agricultural work" shows, it is not to replace agricultural tools with mobile phones, nor to replace agricultural materials with data, nor to replace agricultural work with live broadcasts. First, it means that new media is no longer a stranger and a passive intervener to farmers, but a familiar thing and active factor that can establish an organic connection with them on a daily basis. Secondly, it means to understand, participate in and control the operation of new media based on the life logic and labor logic of farmers, so that mobile phones, data and live broadcasts can be reversed into new agricultural tools, new agricultural materials and new agricultural work. - Of course, to some extent, the emergence of this possibility is partly due to the lack of funds in Rongjiang County and the inability to capitalize large-scale operations, but more importantly, it is created by relying on mass media practices.
"Cun Chaomarket" has already "gone out of the circle", but the media practice behind it that has enabled it to "go out of the circle" has not yet "gone out of the circle", and the new possibilities revealed by this media practice have received even less attention, and these are also worthy of our in-depth tracking and thinking.