Pictures show how internet growth helped the little guy
While the recent Fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, East China’s Zhejiang province, showed off the world’s most cutting-edge online technologies, a photo exhibition, which ran concurrently with the event offered a glimpse into how such developments have benefited the users.
There were 100 photos in total, through the display of which, ordinary people got to step into the spotlight and see how their lives have been changed by technology.
As the name of the exhibition — Warmth — suggested, the pictures, together with the stories behind them warmed the hearts of those hurrying past in the bitter wind and rain of Wuzhen.
So how has the internet exerted influence upon ordinary people’s lives over the past two decades?
Of the images used, one was attributed to Zhou Mi, a photographer at the Jiangxi branch of Xinhua News Agency. When he saw the picture at the convention center on Nov 7, he was instantly transported back to the moment when he had pressed the shutter.
In the photo a man can be seen presenting a video clip showing off the wares and produce of his mountain hometown, such as dried bamboo shoots, preserved vegetables and dried beans, to his fans online.
The 40-year-old man, named Jiang Jinchun, is from a remote village in Jiangxi province’s Hengfeng county. However, with more than 1 million fans now from all around the country on popular short video and live streaming apps like Kuaishou, he is also an online celebrity.
For 11 years he had his own business in Yiwu, a paradise for small merchandise trade in Zhejiang. However, Jiang said he returned to his hometown in 2011 where he began posting short videos online for a living in 2015.
He sometimes role-plays Lu Zhishen, a warrior monk from classic novel The Water Margin, and often uploads short videos showing the area’s landscape, the everyday lives of the local farmers and their agricultural products.
As he became more well known by a growing number of fans, local products, like the ones in the picture, were snapped up by his fans.
Jiang says through the videos, he has helped villagers to sell out more than 900 kilograms of tea, around 300 kg of dried bamboo shoots and more than 600 kg of products made from the root of kudzu vine, a kind of traditional Chinese medicine this year.
By 2017, he had helped more than 200 families from around 50 villages, including 40-something low-income families, to sell their agricultural products.
Zhou says it took the whole day for him to get from Nanchang, Jiangxi’s provincial capital, to Jiang’s remote hometown in the mountains.
“Yet thanks to the internet, people around the world get to know about the village and the story of Jiang,” Zhou says, adding that for the first time he truly realized that the internet has brought people in urban and rural areas much closer together.
The internet has provided ordinary people with a new opportunity to achieve success, says Lu Su, chief technology officer of Ant Financial Services Group, one of the organizers of the exhibition.
The protagonists of the exhibition’s 100 images come from 26 provinces and regions around China, as well as another 12 countries and regions such as Australia and Angola. Agricultural topics, start-up businesses and public-spirited activities mainly feature in the exhibition.
“It might be the first photo exhibition that aims to summarize ordinary people’s life in the internet era,” says Liu Yu, curator of the exhibition and director of the photographic center at the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
Through the exhibition, audiences got to see how those daily routines, which are facilitated by internet technology that they might take for granted, have changed the life of another group of people in need.
War veteran Hu Dingyuan was born in 1920, and passed away earlier this year. In April last year, he finally got to host a family reunion that he had dreamed of for 77 years with the help of the internet.
He joined the army in 1940 to fight in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) before moving to Taiwan. Seeing his growing homesickness, in early March 2017, his 19-yearold step-granddaughter went online to help him seek out his lost relatives. With the help of volunteers, media and local government, he finally went home to Luzhou, in Southwest China’s Sichuan province, mourned his parents and reunited with 80 descendants of his three sisters.
Xu Bin, director of the omnimedia video and photography department of Zhejiang Daily Press Group, the co-organizer of the photo exhibition, says that the exhibition illustrates that the leading characters in the continuing story of the internet are still the general public.
According to Liu, 20 of the 100 photos are going to be presented at the ongoing 2018 Baohe International Photography Week in Hefei, Anhui province, which started on Nov 23.