Preamble

Research on the Communication of Aesthetic Culture in Short Videos Under the Context of Media Convergence

Du Lin¹, He Ping²
(1. Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100091; 2. School of Literature, Changchun Normal University, Changchun, Jilin 130123)

Abstract

[Objective] This paper aims to explore the aesthetic and cultural characteristics of short videos within the context of media convergence and their role in promoting the integration of traditional and emerging media, thereby providing theoretical support for the healthy development of short video communication. [Method] Through literature analysis, this study examines the aesthetic cultural features of short videos, identifies existing problems, and discusses optimization strategies. [Results] As a new form of content production, short videos exhibit visual and emotional experiences fundamentally different from traditional media communication methods, yet they are also accompanied by corresponding communication risks. [Conclusion] In the context of media convergence, mainstream media's strengthened guidance on the emotional and content dimensions of short videos will contribute to promoting the healthy and sustainable development of this emerging communication form.

Keywords: short videos; media convergence; aesthetic culture; communication; media

Classification Code: G244
Document Code: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)02-77-05
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.02.014
Citation Format: Du Lin, He Ping. Research on the Communication of Aesthetic Culture in Short Videos Under the Context of Media Convergence [J]. China Media Technology, 2025, 32(2): 77-81.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has attached great importance to the integrated development of traditional and emerging media [1]. Short videos have become an indispensable communication form in modern society, emerging as a new type of content production that drives the integration of traditional media and digital platforms. In 2013, a series of short video applications were launched successively, diversifying the short video market. Despite technical limitations such as bandwidth constraints and video dimensions, their popularity grew at an astonishing rate. Douyin, a music creative short video social platform launched in 2016, combined 15-second short videos with music, supported by precise recommendation algorithms and robust operational strategies, including celebrity-driven traffic attraction [3]. This approach enabled Douyin to rapidly achieve high user stickiness in first- and second-tier cities, establishing itself as a leading platform in the short video domain. In 2019, WeChat also entered the short video competition by launching its short video function, consolidating its leading position in the social media market and driving the socialization and normalization of short video development. Thus, short videos have evolved from initial video sharing to social interaction, then to personalized recommendations and cross-platform development, fundamentally transforming traditional media communication methods and profoundly influencing modern social culture and digital marketing.

1. The Development History of Short Videos

Short videos are essentially a media form distinct from traditional media such as television, radio, and newspapers. They refer to video content of relatively short duration published and disseminated through online platforms. Their communication forms, content creation methods, and interactivity have made them an important medium for modern information dissemination. The development history can be summarized through several landmark events.

The origins of short videos can be traced back to 2005 when YouTube, the world's first large-scale video sharing platform, officially launched with the slogan "Broadcast Yourself" [2], encouraging users to upload and share short or original videos. YouTube's launch quickly attracted a massive user base, making it the world's largest video sharing platform. With the rise of social media, platforms like Twitter and Facebook also introduced short video sharing functions to enhance user activity and interactivity. Short videos gradually integrated into modern social life as an important form of daily communication and information sharing.

Domestic short video development entered a rapid growth phase after 2011. The Kuaishou App was officially launched in 2011, initially focusing on GIF creation tools. In the following year, Kuaishou evolved into a short video platform, targeting third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas, successfully accumulating a large volume of "grassroots user" traffic and laying the foundation for the popularization of short video platforms.

2. Formation Reasons for Short Video Aesthetic Culture in the Context of Media Convergence

The formation of short video aesthetic culture is a complex process involving multiple interwoven factors, including technological progress, changing social demands, platform evolution, and the transformation of cultural communication models. As a new communication form, the development of short video aesthetic culture exhibits distinct contemporary characteristics and dynamic features compared to traditional media aesthetic culture.

2.1 Technical and Platform Support

Short video production and dissemination primarily rely on mobile smart terminals (such as smartphones) and high-speed internet technology. The popularization of mobile devices has made content creation both more professional and more democratized—a single smartphone can enable content planning, production, and dissemination, allowing virtually anyone to become a content creator. Meanwhile, applications based on high-speed networks enable rapid uploading, sharing, and dissemination of short videos, significantly lowering the threshold for content creation and providing fundamental support for the formation of short video aesthetic culture.

Short video platforms provide user-friendly editing tools and powerful video processing capabilities, enabling ordinary users to easily produce and publish videos. Compared to the centralized production mechanism of traditional media, short video platforms promote the decentralization of content creation, allowing everyone to create distinctive video content based on their interests and creativity. This further drives the diversification and personalization of short video aesthetic culture, enabling certain aesthetic trends and popular elements to spread rapidly.

2.2 Mainstream Media's Application of Short Videos

With the convening of the National Two Sessions in 2022, major mainstream media platforms in China increased their investment in short video news and information propaganda, ensuring that all departments involved in short video product production could raise their awareness and that journalists could prioritize mobile content production needs without blindly imitating [4]. This approach strengthened media integration and demonstrated stronger verticalization and contextualization characteristics. This trend not only drives the continuous expansion of mainstream media short videos in segmented fields but also maintains an overall stable and positive development momentum.

Meanwhile, the diversification of content innovation and the widespread application of new technologies have further enhanced the communication efficiency and promotion effectiveness of short video news. Through immersive scene displays, real-time reporting, and intelligent recommendation technologies, short videos strengthen audience engagement and immersion, bringing greater influence and coverage to information dissemination and becoming an important component of mainstream media reporting forms.

2.3 The Driving Force of "Internet Celebrities"

The rapid rise of short video platforms has spawned numerous "internet celebrity" phenomena. Unlike ordinary users, internet celebrities are not only content consumers but also professional content creators on short video platforms. They typically possess strong appeal, are adept at capturing hot topics, and can quickly generate content with broad dissemination potential. This phenomenon creates a positive cycle in short video production and dissemination: internet celebrities continuously attract user attention through content creation, and user feedback and preferences further drive the development and popularization of short video aesthetic culture.

3. Characteristics of Short Video Aesthetic Culture

3.1 Fragmentation

The advancement of modernization has broken down original social norms and market environments, leading to segmentation and differentiation among various groups. Different social groups have developed their own distinct needs and demands, and their perspectives have become increasingly diverse. Society has fragmented into different interest groups, and this social segmentation has brought about differences in cultural demands, forming a "fragmented" society [5]. Cultural communication fragmentation originates from social fragmentation.

Short videos, as a communication medium, are a typical representation of social fragmentation characteristics. Through rapid and concise information presentation, this communication form cuts originally continuous and systematic cultural expressions into independent, scattered fragments, filling them into the零碎的时间和注意力空隙 of human daily life in more refined content forms. Consequently, the "micro-aesthetic" [6] characteristics displayed by short videos have emerged precisely under this background of information overload.

Aesthetic experience fragmentation manifests in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, short videos are characterized by brief duration and concise information, typically expressing core content within seconds to minutes. Spatially, short videos as aesthetic carriers of the mobile media era are not confined to specific spaces; their aesthetic expectations and satisfactions are completed instantly—for instance, one can finish watching a short video while riding an elevator. This fragmentation permeates all aspects of people's lives, increasingly occupying an important position.

3.2 Circularity

Peter Blau's "proximity" theory explains circularity, stating that "people in similar social positions share common social experiences and roles, as well as similar attributes and attitudes, all of which promote social interaction among them." Compared to people with vastly different social positions, interactions among those with similar positions are more common. In the spiritual domain, circularity manifests as similar aesthetic cognition and taste, forming a community that shares aesthetic concepts.

Circularity in communication is mainly reflected in social media information dissemination, particularly on short video platforms where user groups and platform audiences highly overlap. Therefore, short video communication can no longer be considered independent of the social communication context; its influence is inevitably constrained by social network structures. Within the same or similar circles, short videos can achieve efficient information diffusion and interactive feedback due to shared needs and interests, rapidly forming broad communication effects. However, short videos based on aesthetic and cognitive interests can only involve distribution mechanisms within these circles; they struggle to break through social circle barriers and reach broader audiences. Only those short videos capable of crossing different circles can trigger strong reactions in wider social networks.

It should be noted that this circularity differs from hierarchical differentiation in offline real society, i.e., social class. Its main manifestation is the hierarchical power of information influence and discourse. French philosopher Foucault argued that discourse, as a symbolic existence, is the core element of power relations operation: "Discourse is composed of signs, but what discourse forms is more than just using these signs to refer to things. It is this 'more' that prevents things from being reduced to language and speech" [7]. The circularity characteristics of short videos centrally reflect the hierarchical order and derivative power behind discourse.

3.3 Superficiality

The most significant feature of postmodern culture is "a new flat and depthless feeling" [8], one manifestation of which is the aesthetics of short video images. Due to their small content volume, fragmented form, and flattened meaning, short videos represent one of the products of postmodern culture. Short video production concentrates a large amount of everyday aesthetic experience. While this "daily life moving closer to aesthetics and art, and art gradually entering life" [9]—the "aestheticization of everyday life"—is not inherently negative, it is accompanied by massive replication of life phenomena. Tailoring facts with individual experience, the content becomes a passive extension of aesthetic perception rather than a positive intervention of public thinking in life, diluting deep aesthetic meaning. This constitutes a singular superficial relationship between creators and videos.

In terms of aesthetic experience, short videos utilize simulation techniques; the replicated images can satisfy desires through realistic illusions in a short time but lose deep thinking and lasting pleasure. Moreover, the information expressed in short videos is not a continuous flow of information, and the audience's experience is compressed into a process highly dependent on immediate stimulation, causing aesthetic experience to be flattened. In this communication mechanism, short videos are no longer media that trigger thinking but directly trigger audience emotional responses and sensory pleasure through extremely simplified visual symbols, emphasizing rapid sensory stimulation and immediate feedback rather than deep thinking or long-term emotional precipitation. The subjectivity originally present in images gradually disappears, replaced by an "empty field" state—viewers only obtain instantaneous pleasure from direct visual impact, lacking in-depth thinking participation and emotional precipitation. Images degenerate from carriers of narrative and thinking into pure visual intuition, with pleasure becoming their ultimate consumption purpose [10]. In this context, short videos are no longer media that narrate or express certain ideas but reduce the viewing experience to immediate audio-visual supply, further immersing viewers in pure sensory stimulation.

4. Challenges Facing Short Video Aesthetic Culture Communication in the Context of Media Convergence

4.2 "Aesthetic Cocoon" Resulting from Privatization

In the information age, "information cocoon" (information cocoon) typically describes the cognitive limitation phenomenon where people are isolated from diverse information due to algorithmic push and only access personalized content: "a communication domain in which we only hear what we have chosen and what comforts and pleases us" [11]. In modern media environments, short videos have become an important form of mass cultural consumption due to their simplicity, intuitiveness, and rapid dissemination. However, this communication form, while continuously shaping individual aesthetic behavior, also profoundly influences public taste, political attitudes, and social cultural ecology, gradually constructing an "aesthetic cocoon."

The "aesthetic cocoon" phenomenon in short videos stems from the disruption of intermediality in traditional aesthetic practice by the internet and digital technology. In this context, aesthetic practice is continuously weakened, critical distance subsequently dissolves, and the role of cultural publicness in the aesthetic domain gradually declines [12]. Public taste thus becomes increasingly privatized, and this privatized, homogenized aesthetic taste, aided by technical push, creates new cultural isolation phenomena, causing public aesthetics centered on common values and moral goals to gradually lose living space. This "aesthetic cocoon" not only fragments communication between different cultures but also continuously reduces audience tolerance for diverse art forms, indicating that the "aesthetic cocoon" phenomenon is not merely an individualization trend in aesthetic choice but more profoundly affects the social cultural ecology, causing it to gradually deviate from the public value system and endangering cultural diversity and social cohesion.

4.3 Fragmentation and Misinterpretation in Cultural Communication

Modern media has become an invisible barrier connecting spiritual activities and the public. During short video playback, various intuitive images and visuals impact our retinas at high speed and in continuous succession, while the brain becomes a passive receiver, unimpededly absorbing these images and information without undergoing complex thinking processing and logical transformation. Information transmission shifts from a process requiring subjective cognitive participation to a direct relationship between things—that is, the immediate supply of pleasure, desire, and satisfaction.

In the communication process, short videos often seek novelty and exaggeration to gain traffic, which can fragment originally coherent cultural backgrounds and interpret complex cultural symbols as simple visual elements, causing their deep meanings to be ignored or distorted and preventing accurate transmission of cultural connotations and information. For example, certain folk rituals or cultural symbols are presented in an entertaining manner in short videos, even detached from their original historical and contextual backgrounds, becoming "exotic" or "labeled" symbols. This treatment easily triggers audience misunderstanding, weakening the authenticity and diversity of cultural exchange.

Due to differences in receivers' horizons of expectation, cultural backgrounds, and cognition, cultural information receives different interpretations, causing original intentions and values to be misunderstood or distorted. This misinterpretation is particularly evident in short video communication. In excessive participation and over-dissemination, everyone's perceptive abilities are questioned, and misinterpreted content and viewpoints spread again, deepening cultural barriers and hindering deep understanding and resonance between different cultures.

5. Optimization Strategies for Short Video Aesthetic Culture Communication

5.2 Improving Content Quality and Audience Focus in Media Convergence

Emotion is indispensable in aesthetic activities. In the information age, short videos as a form of information recording of daily life inherently possess highly generalized scenes that generate strong stimulation and directly appeal to the senses, profoundly influencing aesthetic subjects. Mainstream media utilizes this characteristic not only to transmit information but also to establish emotional resonance with audiences at the emotional level. In terms of content, by selecting topics with universality and commonality, mainstream media can push short video visual communication from pan-entertainment to vertical deepening, awakening deep emotional connections within audiences. However, for negative emotions that enter the aesthetic culture category, such as violence and "sang" culture (a nihilistic subculture), traditional media should leverage its official channel advantages to strengthen positive guidance, block negative emotions, and form a positive emotional resonance atmosphere to promote healthy and benign development of short videos.

"Reality is deeply influenced by media" [14]. As a lightweight, mobile, and fragmented information communication carrier, short videos highly align with mass media usage habits and information reception needs, becoming a common form of information presentation and acquisition. As an effective tool for cross-platform communication, short videos can complement traditional media, social media, and emerging platforms, not only broadening video audience groups but also enhancing content diversity and breadth, thereby improving overall content quality and obtaining broader expressive space.

Mainstream media-produced short videos face the general public, and public acceptance is an important standard for measuring short video quality. When innovating short video content, staff should go deep into grassroots communities, investigate public opinions on mainstream media short videos, connect with people's lives, adjust short video content, and understand people's interests and hobbies. Good news is the ultimate pursuit of humanistic care and "people as ends" [15]; therefore, video production must have this core competitiveness. Additionally, platforms should optimize recommendation algorithms by incorporating diversified perspectives into algorithmic recommendations, actively pushing high-quality content from different fields to help audiences broaden their aesthetic horizons and reduce aesthetic closure.

Whether traditional or new media, their operational methods and underlying commercial logic are the same. Therefore, traditional media can leverage its advantages in resources and experience to establish sponsor databases and short video account operation teams, find sponsors that match account content tonality, achieve precise delivery to lock in audiences, and form a virtuous cycle. Utilizing the integrated form of short videos that combines "collection, editing, and dissemination," news organizations can break through information carriers based on text and images, actively advancing the general trend of media convergence in the new media era through a dynamic media carrier in news reporting, "achieving all-media production and all-medium dissemination" [16].

5.3 Construction Strategy of Short Video "Singularity"

Dufrenne points out that the depth of aesthetic objects is not equivalent to distance in time or space, nor does it depend on some kind of concealment. Its important sign is "singularity." "When aesthetic objects cannot make us feel surprised, cannot make us enter a new world, we cannot completely regard them as aesthetic objects. For us, they are still like practical objects" [17]. Only when objects generate a sense of wonder and bring us into a new world can they be considered to have depth. For practical objects or everyday life states, the sense of wonder is arbitrary or accidental, but for aesthetic objects, it seems to be necessary.

Due to their duration and compact content, short videos often quickly create a "surprise" effect through visual impact, plot twists, and highly creative visual language, stripping viewers from familiar contexts of daily life and entering a "aesthetic moment" full of freshness and strangeness. It is in the creation of this singularity that short videos transform ordinary life scenes and daily fragments through editing, special effects, and narrative innovation, attracting audiences to generate empathy and constructing a brief yet fulfilling aesthetic depth. Therefore, as a new visual medium, short videos need to explore more diverse expressive paths in singularity to achieve organic integration of aesthetic depth and social value.

Short videos in the new era context of media convergence demonstrate the value of "uniqueness"—highlighting individual delicate emotional experiences and unique memory experiences through personalized expression. This "uniqueness" is not only a reflection of content differentiation but also the fundamental premise of creation. As Kant pointed out, scientific "determinative judgment" is "subsuming the particular under the universal," while reflective judgment "seeks the universal from the particular" [18], which is also Kant's basic orientation of thought. Short videos need to follow this reflective judgment path, searching for new paradigms of aesthetic culture from unique perspectives and fragments, allowing viewers to feel the richness of humanity and life in brief segments, thereby completing emotional triggering and ideological precipitation. This unique narrative power is precisely why short videos have become carriers of aesthetic innovation in the new era.

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Author Bios: Du Lin (1998—), female, Han ethnicity, from Handan, Hebei, Master's degree, research direction in ethics and aesthetics; He Ping (1965—), female, Han ethnicity, from Changchun, Jilin, Master's degree, Professor, research direction in foreign literature.