In the process of acquiring a language, plenty of “passive vocabulary” tends to crop up. By “passive vocabulary” here, I don’t mean words that are positive or negative in tone or register — I mean words you hear often, and might even use yourself, yet rarely understand the actual meaning of. For a long stretch of time, the word “geili” (给力, roughly “awesome” / “powerful”) was exactly this kind of passive vocabulary for me. Thanks to the great Baidu Baike, I finally learned what it means: helpful, effective, flattering/face-giving.

Sites like Douban and Xiaonei all have a “friends’ recent activity” feature, usually placed right on the homepage. Once you log in, everything your friends have said, read, and taken an interest in is laid out in front of you. If the network is slow and the refresh isn’t fast enough, it often feels overwhelming just looking at it. Ever since I joined these social networks, I kept discovering more and more “geili” activities and journal posts… refreshing my various homepages over and over.

When I had nothing to do, I’d click around and look — this stuff really did seem geili. There were howls of rage after failed pickup attempts, personality quizzes categorizing people’s “interest” in sex, sexy celebrity photos designed to catch the public eye, and maybe, at the very end, you’d even spot some sharer’s parting line: “It’s all just floating clouds anyway.”

I’m not exactly slow to pick up trending slang, nor am I particularly numb to things, but the racket of geili-ness really doesn’t suit me, so I simply cut down on the kinds of “recent activity” I follow, sticking to books, films, and music, clicking into people’s pages just to enjoy their interests and opinions. But after doing this for a while, I noticed a rather “geili” problem of my own. A lot of so-called geili content is really just taking some piece of content to an extreme, then delivering it in popular, easily digestible rhetoric to draw attention to what is, underneath it all, a perfectly ordinary truth.

This geili culture is like the vulgar, fast-food culture of the forum-photo era — pile after pile of exclamation marks, paragraph after paragraph of blank space, as if no amount of it could ever fill in the poster’s emptiness and loneliness. During National Day, there was that whole Xiaoyueyue forum thread — I started reading it happily enough, but honestly found it super boring. First, that was someone else’s private life (or possibly fake); second, that something like that could attract such intense attention felt, to me, really not geili at all.

There’s another puzzle I find interesting too. I haven’t watched TV in I don’t know how many years, not wanting to be infected by the one-size-fits-all rhetoric television pushes — but under the various geili-fications of social networking sites, am I not just being infiltrated by some other kind of collective online unconscious? I remember someone once wrote about a similar issue: the media are all desperately showing themselves off through their headlines, and the result is distorted reporting. This overly geili culture is probably the same.