'Obama Girl' exposes easily manipulated society

15:52, December 15, 2009

By Xiao Kailin


US President Barack Obama's first visit produced few tangible results, but it did popularize one "lucky" girl.

While Obama was giving a speech at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum on November 16, Wang Zifei, a graduate student from Shanghai Jiaotong University who was sitting behind him, took off her red jacket and exposed her black dress.

The whole process was filmed and uploaded to the Internet. Wang Zifei soon became famous and is now called China's "Obama Girl."

Although this slightly absurd behavior showed how little attention people pay to serious politics, it is quite normal in this era of entertainment. However, the story wasn't over.

Just when people were praising the elegance of the "Obama Girl," it was reported that she admitted to the media last week that the whole process was actually carefully planned by her boyfriend and herself, with the intention of becoming famous and starting a career in the entertainment industry.

Rumors said that her boyfriend paid 200,000 yuan ($29,292) to a network planning team in Beijing to manage her appearance, using Obama's speech as an opportunity to popularize her image.

Consequently, the public felt fooled, and Wang and her boyfriend have been widely condemned. But if the media follows unimportant news like this, it can easily be manipulated. It accelerates the transformation of news into nothing more than a cheap form of entertainment.

Public discourse now rarely concentrates on serious issues, and people are used to considering everything as entertainment. Since it didn't deal with gossip or celebrity, Obama's visit to China was never going to catch young people's attention.

We see two extremes: Those netizens who talked about Wang with unbridled passion and enthusiastic, and the students with bored expressions who asked dreary questions at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.

What is more terrifying is that both are interchangeable. Put the netizens in a serious context, and they will be bored; put the students on the Internet, and they will go crazy.

Another famous case shows how easily a bored Internet population can be manipulated into anger. On October 12, a post called "A HIV+ woman in Rongcheng, Hebei Province had a sexual relationship with 279 clients" was posted on the Internet, together with hundreds of indecent pictures.

Although Yan Deli, the women in the pictures, kept claiming her innocence, netizens pursued her harshly and even harassed her in real life. The truth was not revealed until police intervened and Yan Deli proposed taking a HIV test.

In fact, it was a malicious slander done by Yan Deli's ex-boyfriend, a married man who had attempted to force her to give him money when they broke up. The uproar instantly stopped on the Internet, but a young woman's life had been irretrievably shadowed.

Other cases, such as "Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner," a famous post that amused many netizens with its mixture of the domestic and the modern, have also been accused of being faked for publicity.

When people's thoughts are no longer on serious matters but only sex, cars and jobs, this kind of thing isn't surprising. Vulgar rumors and publicity-seeking can easily find fertile ground in such a society.

When the "Obama Girl" case was about to be defined as another faked incident, more news emerged. Wang made a clarification on her personal blog, and it was discovered that the claim that her boyfriend and she had faked the affair originated from a fake source.

After being fooled time and again, we need to reflect on what our society's values are. It may be that we are merely a society in transition, and that the tumult of these times reflects that confusion.

There are much worse things than a little fuss about the "Obama Girl" out there. What's really worrying isn't whether we've lost the ability to tell what's true and false on the Internet, but whether we've lost the ability to judge between right and wrong.

The author is a Beijing-based journalist

Source: Global Times

Obama Girl in Red Coat - Wang Zifei - www.latestmasala.com