Just killing time

Updated: 2016-05-28 09:41

By Chen Mengwei(China Daily)

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Just killing time

[Photo/China Daily]

Boredom generates demands-Huge, ravenous ones-and many of those who are in its clutches feel they have nothing to do and way too much time in which not to do it. Some of the luckier ones will have wheelbarrows of cash to burn, and these days their avenue for doing that can be online, where they attempt to anesthetize their pain by watching what in most cases seems to be others just like them-boring people doing boring things. Welcome to the era of online live broadcasting, brought to you by those who deal in ennui and may hope to make a bit of money from it-or no money at all. As technology has made it possible for anyone to be a video star, it seems that many of these people have decided one sure-fire way of ensuring they stand out is to be unconventional.

Of course that suggests there must be a convention to be broken in the first place. In this case convention dictates that anyone going on air calls their activity a broadcast, which generally conjures up the picture of a well-dressed and coiffed professional delivering a script to the masses and being well paid to do so.

So those wanting to appear a little more radical, something apart from these conventional broadcasters, needed a newly minted job title, and in China that is wangluozhubo. This translates as online broadcaster, and the proof that it has taken off lies in the Chinese search engine Bing, which brings up 2,070,000 results when you search for it, and on Baidu, which brings up triple that number.

The popularity of online live broadcasting is such that in many quarters, especially among young people, the word zhubo, which translates as broadcaster or presenter, is now used strictly to refer to online broadcasters.

To differentiate them and traditional TV or radio broadcasters, the latter are now routinely referred to as zhuchiren, or anchors.

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