I suddenly remembered the old days of chatting in chat rooms. No purpose, just plain simple text, pure friend-making — I really miss it.

Two complete strangers, through their IDs in a virtual world, starting from a timid “hello, where are you from,” and moving on to ramble about hobbies, interests, life ambitions. Back then, you never cared about someone’s background or character, let alone presumed to judge them through the narrow lens of your own experience. So whatever you said, that’s what you were. Interestingly, wasn’t being listened to so attentively exactly what I was after back then? People are always forgetting, and always rediscovering.

But the development of online social networking seems to be moving in the opposite direction from this unconditional kind of interaction. On sites like Douban and Renren, there are columns for introducing your own hobbies and interests. Especially on Douban, mutual understanding can be broken down all the way to ratings for every single film, every book, every album. This abundance of varied information is, no doubt, an earnest attempt to answer the somewhat philosophical question of “who are you” — but the medium is nothing more than information reduced to “symbols.” Two people who both love The Moon and Sixpence might have nothing to say to each other; two people who both rate Afternoon Dream Return a 1 might understand the film in completely different ways… even two people who both like wuxia novels might fail to become friends.

The virtual existence of the internet is excessively shaping and interpreting every user — and doing so by means of symbols riddled with ambiguity. After consulting this information, individuals stack and reassemble symbols about the other person in their minds, ultimately constructing another “person.” This sort of quasi-quantitative-analysis “research” happens ceaselessly, every day, inside the minds of countless internet users. After “reading” enough people this way, one might even sort these symbols into categories — what star sign you are, where you were born, what your blood type is, and so on.

We seem to have grown so busy that we’ve forgotten the most basic way of getting to know and understand another person. In the end, all that’s left is using one’s pretty little face, pretty body, pretty mind on some online platform, to attract those “semioticians” who love quantification. So, internet — you know too much.