The formation and transformation of digital class in the Web2.0 era

The elimination of the boundary between reality and virtuality is an important feature of the Web2.0 era. The most noteworthy point in the Web2.0 era is that everyone in the real world will complete a deconstruction of identity and power on this platform. This will provide a genetic reserve for a new round of identity and power reconstruction in the Internet world. These deconstructed fragmented genes are stored in the Internet's huge gene database. Each gene has the innate conditions to form a digital personality. After an appropriate conversion mechanism, different digital classes can be formed. With the in-depth development of Internet information monitoring, different digital classes can be converted.

The transformation from citizen genes to digital classes: the role of identity and power construction mechanisms

The Internet in the Web2.0 era has already virtualized the personalities of the real world. With the emergence of cloud storage, information storage has been continuously expanded, and the storage of citizen genes has gradually become possible with increasingly powerful data storage capabilities. The Internet's processing of citizen genes has gone through two steps: collection and equalization. After the process of collection and storage, citizen genes have the ability to transform into digital personalities and eventually form a digital class.

The construction of identity and power plays a key role in the digital personality of online citizens, and the differences in the way information is produced in the Internet world determine the differences in digital classes. Based on the different ways of information production, I divide the digital class into three levels: digital tenant class, digital middle class, and digital elite class.

In his book Cognitive Surplus, American writer Clay Shirky points out that people use media for three purposes: consumption, creation, and sharing. These three activities now constitute the basic activities of Internet citizens in the Web 2.0 era. The digital class is divided based on the different ways in which Internet citizens consume, create, and share information.

The digital tenant class of Internet citizens mainly engages in the creation, sharing and consumption of "information". The "information" here refers to the lowest content in the information pyramid. Its main characteristics are trivial discourse based on personal life, entertaining and worthless information presented to cater to the psychology of the masses. It is the noise and redundancy in Claude Shannon's information theory. Too much of this kind of information will cause the flood of information in the communication process, offsetting the effective role of knowledge and wisdom. The digital tenant class of Internet citizens is often seen in Weibo as individuals who make boring displays of their private lives, pay too much attention to and share hearsay Internet rumors, participate in unfounded Internet anti-counterfeiting activities, create low-level information content that lacks social responsibility awareness and humanistic care, and pile up information illogically. Internet citizens of this class are easily influenced by the public opinion vane. At this stage, the Internet water army and the 50-cent party are mostly composed of them.

The digital middle class of online citizens mainly engage in the creation, sharing and consumption of "information" and "knowledge". "Knowledge" refers to the information in the middle of the information pyramid. The function of knowledge is to make people think critically and have a certain ability to introspect and think about the various aspects of society. Knowledge provides a certain foundation for the formation of mainstream values ​​on the Internet and has a certain reference value. The digital middle class of online citizens sometimes display their private lives in a chaotic mosaic style and are interested in low-cultivation information, but they are different from the digital tenant class who are simply addicted and unthinking. They are more able to maintain their own thinking ability and have a rich cultural reserve, but they still have no ability to transform perceptual knowledge into the crystallization of wisdom. This group of people occupies the vast majority of the online citizen society. Most of them are students, teachers, white-collar workers with social experience, ordinary employees of companies, executives, etc. with a certain level of education.

The digital elite network citizens do not focus on information and knowledge. What they care about is the production of "wisdom" at the top of the information pyramid. As the information at the top of the information pyramid, "wisdom" has a strong philosophical meaning and can summarize the universal laws of various events. The interpretation of events by wisdom is programmatic and has a strong guiding significance. "The heart is to think, and thinking leads to results." In observing worldly affairs, the digital elite class uses not only a pair of eyes but also a warm heart to dissect the complicated events. The pursuit of truth, the persistence of good thoughts, and the persistence of beauty are the core characteristics of the digital elite class. In the ocean of online information, they are opinion leaders with the power of discourse that can be responded to by everyone. In the scene of "watching and changing China", they are the most powerful callers, and their strong personal charm is a topic that people talk about with relish.

The mutual transformation of digital classes: the possibilities given by information monitoring mechanisms

The citizen gene completes the class construction according to the different information production contents, so can the digital class that has been formed be transformed? If so, what is the mechanism of transformation? The development of Internet information technology has provided the possibility for class transformation, that is, the formation of information monitoring mechanism.

In a sense, the Internet information monitoring mechanism is a powerful "panopticon" that handles the most cumbersome supervision at the lowest cost. The Internet has gradually become an electronic monitor that runs all the time. At any time, any tiny behavior and trajectory of any Internet citizen will be recorded in the network's huge data center. The transformation of the digital class actually lies in the airtightness of information monitoring. Foucault once said: "People die in the panopticon", which provides a powerful metaphor for every Internet citizen - everyone lives under surveillance and completes the survival mission on the Internet.

In a rough form, the information monitoring mechanism is formed by the mixing of two air currents.

The first stream of airflow comes from social media represented by Facebook. This stream of airflow records and monitors people's information from the bottom up. Every user of social tools is keen to speak out. They show and expose themselves on social platforms day and night. The words they say, the pictures they send out, the names, birthdays, genders, hobbies, home addresses, personal phone numbers, etc. filled in the forms are endlessly exposed on social platforms, just like "personal resumes" submitted to social platforms. Therefore, social platforms represented by Facebook have obtained the "identity cards" of many Internet citizens. Social tools have aggregated the information resources of Internet citizens to form their own resource advantages.

The second airflow comes from search engines represented by Google. This airflow is from top to bottom, and it is a huge database formed by the unconscious exposure of Internet citizens. The special weapon of the search engine is its unique spider program. The spider relies on nodes to widely distribute information, and each node is connected rather than isolated. The final effect is "the net of heaven is vast and wide, and nothing can escape it." The job of the spider is to crawl through the website continuously, crawling and indexing from top to bottom. The information of many websites and the tracks of many personal privacy are all included. Extensive web-building and panoramic monitoring are the characteristics of this airflow.

The confluence of the two streams from bottom to top and from top to bottom forms a powerful vortex phenomenon, which mixes all the information together and completes the aggregation and centralized storage management of the monitored information. In the Web2.0 era, this powerful information monitoring mechanism has prompted everyone to show their true face to others, and the hypocritical network masks will gradually withdraw from the stage of history. Because of the existence of this information monitoring mechanism, network citizens can supervise each other. Citizens who show double faces will expose their disloyalty to the public; those who show themselves with real knowledge will also receive people's admiration. In this way, selection is carried out, and the rotation of classes is finally realized.

Of course, the information monitoring mechanism of the Internet is an invasion of biological logic by machine logic. The result is that there are more scenes of the public carnival-like crazy disclosure of personal privacy on the Internet. People are gradually losing their own private space. The private domain is gradually becoming a desolate existence, and some private beauty has come to an end.

The formation and transformation of digital classes in the Web 2.0 era has guiding significance for every Internet citizen. Living in the "panopticon" of the Internet, we are under surveillance and also create information. The quality of information produced determines the digital class of each person. Therefore, every Internet citizen should be responsible for the information they produce. Use the power of personal discourse with caution.

via://webpick.me/shuzi-jieceng/