The first was during the SARS outbreak in 2003, when "the streets of Beijing were empty, the sun shone so brightly that I couldn't even open my eyes, and the sound of ambulances was heard over and over again. The second thing is that one day he suddenly realized that unfamiliar words such as "non-mainstream" and "horse-riding" had become hot search terms on the search engine.
In the context of the domestic Internet, "non-mainstream" is usually used to describe the dress, language and culture and lifestyle of some young people, especially the post-90s. The term "horse killer" is a kind of alternative or even grotesque youth image and aesthetic in the eyes of the general public, and has almost become synonymous with non-mainstream and the post-90s.
As one of China's earliest Internet users, Hou Xiaoqiang built the Sina blog and was CEO of Shanda Literature, creating a wave of Internet culture. Now, he has put down the successful man's frame, almost every day "to meet" a 90-year-old, down to meet nearly a hundred people.
One day not long ago, Hou Xiaoqiang organized a dinner party on a whim, inviting more than 40 old friends to get together. At the table sat 70-year-old scholar Zhou Guoping, 60-year-old fairy tale writer Zheng Yuanjie, actress Liu Xiaoqing, 40-something media personalities Chen Tong, Liu Chun, Li Jing and musician Zhu Zheqin. All of them are famous and starry-eyed, and can be called popular icons of different times. In Hou's words, "they are well-deserved mainstreamers."
At the dinner party, Hou Xiaoqiang solemnly "notified" all the "mainstreamers" of one thing: "Our generation is already non-mainstream, because the former non-mainstream has become mainstream. We thought we were still the trendsetters of culture, we thought we were leading the culture, but in fact the post-90s, post-95s, small-town youths, and killers are now the real mainstream of consuming the Internet and leading the Internet."
Today, Hou Xiaoqiang applies the "give your knees to so-and-so" syntax favored by the post-90s to express the attitude of a post-70s social elite -- "give your knees to the post-90s! "
Fake
If it's accompanied by a young girl's heart, I'm a 100 percent stargazer
In Hou Xiaoqiang's words, the post-90s people to whom he dedicated his knee are not "first-tier celebrity idols" or "giants in the literary world," but most of them are people who can call him "uncle," he said. Most of them are cartoonists, jokesters and entrepreneurs who can call him "uncle".
He spends almost every day on the Internet, "sticking it to whoever's hot" and "sending private messages and making phone calls, asking my friends to convey my respect and love for them" to each other. He "begged to meet" the beast Yi Xiaoxing who made the web drama, Uncle Tongdao and Wang Nima who drew cartoons, Zhu Xuan who wrote about square dancing, Jin Wanzang who wrote about the mystery of the missing Panggamu dry body, and Uncle Copperbird ...... as the first generation of "Internet aborigines". "Internet natives", these post-90s with bizarre screen names are good at creating communication effects on the Internet, and some have more than a million fans and followers.
Hou describes himself as, "Assuming it's paired with a teenage heart, I'm a 100 percent stargazer."
The Internet has given these young people the opportunity to quickly realize their talents. The "ten thousand never thought" web series called beast Yi Xiaoxing became famous in the golden age of user-generated content, before that he was just an ordinary college student majoring in civil engineering.
Ju Xuan, who called himself "Big Brother," wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece on social networking software called "Will Square Dancing Mothers Fight for the Land? , a post that had typos at the time and was retweeted 500,000 times. After becoming popular, he quickly received offers from screenwriters and is now the creative director of a movie studio.
The 90-year-old cartoonist, who goes by the screen name "Tongdao Dajie," uses comics on Weibo to tweet about horoscopes. Hou remembers that the first time he met him, his microblogging fan base was just over 100,000 followers. By the time he met the microblogger for the third time, that number had exceeded 6 million.
Hou Xiaoqiang was impressed by the obvious "decentralized" quality of these post-90s. "When they appear in front of others, nothing represents him, he is him." This is not the same as in the past, when he introduced himself as "I am Sina's so-and-so".
The post-1990s call themselves "craftsmen" or "idol entrepreneurs" with "SOHO-style offices, equivalent to a small business". In fact, they are entrepreneurs who have sprouted from the soil of the Internet and have a better understanding of the market than they can imagine.
Can we be led by them
The disbelief of some of his peers and friends at Hou's enthusiasm for the post-90s may represent the doubts, bewilderment and even prejudice of one generation against another. Almost just as the post-80s were once defined in crude terms, mainstream society has also labeled the post-90s with labels such as "unreliable," "Beat Generation," and the more mean-spirited "brain dead" and "selfish. "Selfish" and so on. Before actively embracing the post-90s, Hou Xiaoqiang's perception of this generation is also stuck in those labeled impressions.
No less than the "SARS" "non-mainstream" shock came, and gradually spread from the Internet to real life. Last year, when Hou Xiaoqiang started his business, he met an investor known as the "Godfather of Angels". The "angel godfather" said to him: "I know you have achieved success in Sina and Shanda Literature, but you're almost 40 years old, you can't squeeze with the 90-year-olds on the one-way bridge of entrepreneurship, and still pass through smoothly."
That conversation ended unhappily, and they even lost touch with each other. But in a sense, the "angel godfather" of Hou Xiaoqiang's merciless blow is not entirely alarmist.
Dedicated to