Short video application, represented by Tik Tok, has had hundreds of millions of users in China. The application which provides functions of shooting, uploading and viewing short videos, has achieved great success. More importantly, it not only brings amusement to its users, but also changes the various forms of Chinese society. This paper focuses on the city, space and infrastructure where bears people's lives. It tries to explore a series of influences of the Tik Tok on China's urban morphology.
With the rapid rise of Tik Tok in China, an interesting phenomenon online celebrated city has emerged since 2018. It mainly refers to some cities that are favored and longed for by Internet users because of attractive urban sceneries, foods or cultures in short videos on Tik Tok. The resonance of emotions in cyberspace has transferred into real behaviors. People who favor these sceneries, similar with religious pilgrims, have poured into the online celebrated cities during holidays. As a consequence, the infrastructures and space, such as stations, bridges and skyscrapers of some big cities, contain more meanings than before. Moreover, what the tourists do at these sites are still shooting short videos by cellphones, polishing them with filters and uploading onto Tik Tok. Thus, the circle between video producers and consumers, online and offline actions have been completed.
The successive reputation and economic benefits led governments of online celebrated city and others adopt some active mediatization methods. These governments mainly use two ways — polarization and city light — to mediatize their cities. Polarization means they intensify the cites’ characteristics by presenting either modern China or traditional China according to their divergent histories. Moreover, governments installed 3 types of lights on urban constructions, no matter traditional or modern ones, which could enhance the visual effects on Tik Tok.
This paper aims to figure out whether these active but limited mediatization methods could really promote a positive cycle on image change of Chinese cities, which are criticized their homogeneity for a long time. Are Chinese cities, through adapting media logic, becoming different? We select short videos from both online celebrated cities and ordinary ones, using micro-cubic model (MCM) to cut every video into pieces in time and space dimensions. Then we calculate the similarity of visual images of different sites from different cities by algorithm. If Chinese cities are similar on image by adopting current mediatization methods, they will still get into trouble with criticism on homogeneous image and have a fierce competition in limited tracks.