There is Lao She Teahouse on Qianmen Street in Beijing, I have been there twice. Apart from drinking tea and watching performances, I always take some time to appreciate the furnishings in the teahouse. Miniature models of old Beijing teahouses are displayed in the teahouse. There are roughly five or six types of teahouses. There are not only teahouses where literati and writers gather, but also teahouses where porters and coolies gather. The teahouses at that time were probably equivalent to today’s offline circle of friends.
In the old days, communication was underdeveloped, but there was a high-quality circle of friends. The face-to-face between people is scene-based, you can smell the lingering aroma of tea, hear the cadence of the language, and see the high-spirited expressions. However, this is not the feeling that the online Moments bring to people. Even if they are in the same office, everyone will choose to communicate through chat tools, erasing their emotions. In this virtual online world, everyone is subtly hidden, trying to keep themselves as quiet as possible.
There are nearly a thousand “friends” in my WeChat Moments. Every time I attend a meeting, when everyone leaves their contact information, they turn on their mobile phones and suddenly realize: “So you are so-and-so, we are already friends!” We are each other’s I don’t know how many likes I clicked, I sent out I don’t know how many smiling faces, and I enthusiastically commented on the food, travel photos, and filial piety of my wife and son, but they were unfamiliar offline.
Communication is a basic need in human life. Only through communication can we influence each other, understand each other, and then achieve coordination in action. My hometown is a mountain village with nearly 1,000 people. In the evening, the entrance of the village will become an opinion field, with dozens of people gathering one after another. Some people leave in the middle, and some people join temporarily. When I go back to my hometown, I always sit at the entrance of the village, listening to the villagers talk about national events, short stories from parents, laughter and laughter, which is very interesting.
My mother told me that some people’s words are true, and some people’s words are nonsense. How did the mother’s judgment come to be? She relies on the character of each person to judge. The opinion field at the entrance of the village has existed for decades, and this is the living circle of friends in the countryside. Everything in this circle of friends is invisible, because everyone is real, and even if someone pretends to be, it will be easily exposed. This is something that network communication cannot do directly. Online communication is always dry. Although WeChat has developed so many emoticons, it still cannot express the real information you want to interpret. You can only feel the multi-dimensional holographic information, the feeling you get when you sit with this person, look at the other person’s expression, listen to the cadence of the words he speaks, and the accent of the person on certain words. Its richness is unmatched by the online world.
Now we are more and more away from “hearing with our own ears and seeing with our own eyes”, and always piecing together the impression of a person through fragmented Internet words and various “brain supplements”. Through the photos, articles or speeches posted in the circle of friends by this person, I guess what kind of person he is, thinking that this is a comprehensive understanding of him, but this is not at all. Meeting in person may seem clumsy, but it is the most efficient way to build affection and trust between people. If some thoughtful and capable colleagues are limited to online text communication for a long time without face-to-face language collisions, they will lose the opportunity to obtain high-quality information, as well as mutual trust and emotional connection. Because you can’t find the problem from their real tone of voice, gestures and other details.
Technology is just a tool. It is better to give someone 10,000 likes online than to meet someone offline. The experience of sitting down and chatting face-to-face is richer, more authentic, and more exciting.
