Material-Type Circle:A Study On The Practice Of TikTok Based On The Elderly Population

The autonomous power of media technology has aroused wide attention in academic circles,and this kind of research logic is contrary to the past research path centered on human subjectivity.Focusing on how the media shape people’s daily life,in this sense,digital media platform has the potential of infrastructure.This research takes the materiality of media as the starting point,the publicity of media as the starting point,the popular Tiktok as the research platform,and adopts ethnography and in-depth interview methods.Investigate how Tiktok is embedded in the life of the elderly and how it shapes their perception of life.The first chapter mainly expounds the reasons for the relative isolation between the elderly group and the intelligent media in the pre-epidemic era,and analyzes how Tiktok achieves domestication of the elderly group.Before the pandemic,older people had every reason to reject smart media because of fear of data costs,fear of smart-phone touch screens and the absence of digital environments around them.After that,smart phones as the main means of epidemic control mode appeared in the elderly group,the elderly group began to actively contact smart phones.A journey of media domestication began.From making phone calls to using wechat and then to using Tiktok,digital platforms continue to intervene in the lives of the elderly.Such intervention changes the perception of time and space of the elderly,and realizes the physical transformation of the elderly,thus completely shaping the sense of living of the elderly.On this basis,elderly groups realize the construction.In view of the above analysis,the third chapter puts forward the concept of "material-type circle" to express the new circle formed by the resonance of technology,human and social structure in the current society with the media "material" as the aggregation mechanism.This new circle structure is different from the former Chinese social circle system with "people" as the core of the aggregation mode,but with "things" as the main aggregation mode,and extends a "ecological" circle structure.This is a new manifestation of Chinese society.The third chapter analyzes the reason of the continuous solidification of the "material-type circle" in the process of forming.This is mainly manifested in three aspects: Firstly,the centralization attribute from the technology itself.This is now manifested as a more explicit centralization of data,with people automatically stratified according to how well they fit into the data;Secondly,it comes from the collusion of capital and technological forces.The game attribute and decoration attribute of technology itself are harvested by capital,which domesticates people’s daily habits with the help of technology,and continuously selects the most ideal consumers with the commercial strategy;Finally,the family structure in Chinese society is also strengthening the circle structure: the intergenerational attribute of the media itself,the social capital attribute hidden behind the media family,the traditional family division of labor and gender roles,these have solidified the social circle.This is contrary to the original intention of media infrastructure and weakens public performance.The fourth chapter mainly discusses that the public efficiency has the characteristics of folding under "material-type circle".Firstly,algorithmic games manipulated by digital platforms filter out older people from the outset,depriving them of the opportunity to participate in public discussion;secondly,the elderly group’s understanding of media platform is not very deep,leading to their full public expression;thirdly,the old people who are frustrated in the public domain turn to the private domain,and submit to the autocracy of intimacy between their families under the pull of the traditional family pattern;once again,the young development logic of media technology itself has its own "rejection of the old";finally,between state power and user use,the platform has gone out of a "anti-control" way of making profits,and publicity folds the original rich public effectiveness of the platform under this profit mode.Finally,this paper is based on intelligent media,the increasingly prominent metaphor of "wasted people" in human society.With the development of artificial intelligence technology,this metaphor will become the sword of Damocles hanging over people’s heads.As technological development gradually transforms the human body structure,there may even be "species" suppression within human beings.In order to escape from repression,to obtain more abundant resources and more suitable circles,human beings will inevitably break through the original national boundaries and start a world nomad.