Recently, one App swept my friend circle: Inke. Branded as China’s first live stream video sharing social media, Inke toped Chinese AppStore in three days. Over one night, every “trendy” young people is on that.
What is Inke?
According to its official page, the design philosophy behind this App is impressive: sharing live moments with others. Wonder how cool it is to live the concert, sharing the moment of bungee jumping, or any part of your amazing life with the whole public!
The feature of “live” makes Inke stand out; unlike Instagram and even Snapchat, it records 100% of people’s real life. You could not regret what you are sending out, let alone edit it.
However, what is currently happening in this application is puzzling: most of the live stream is filled with footage of pretty girls. They wear sexy outfit, either in their bed or in the bathroom, saying flirting words to their audience. If not so, they are making their daily life (folding clothes, smoking, etc.) on live, which is also meaningless to me.
Here are some screenshots I took during some of the live shows: 
Tell me: is that interesting? is that amazing?
I just DON’T understand.
What makes it more interesting is, the live channels that are actually live sports events or music concerts, do not get popular at all.
Inke reminds me of another application called “17”, its ancestor. Five days after 17 was launched, it was forced to be removed off the shelf because it gets more and more sexually suggestive. Lots of people even live their sex-making or inappropriate things online. When the boundary between real-life and digital life could be that neglected, I could not stop wondering: is it because people get weird and sick with the development of this society, or is it because I am too old to accept all this?
I interviewed a friend of mine who is the loyal customer of Inke. Not only is he always tuned on this application, but he is even willing to spend money on it to “send flowers” to the live host. According to his words, “I know I’m bored, and all my friends laugh at me. But these girls are beautiful, and I have nothing else to do. So, why not?”
Yes. Why not? I am nearly convinced by my friend.
No matter what, the birth and growth of weird social media platforms serve what people in this society want. Viewers “sneaking other people’s life” on this application do nothing wrong: they are not harassing others, because those live streams are open due to the host’s own willingness.
However, people watching this at least indicate that they have little real-life interaction with others as what they do on Inke. For example, maybe those boys are too shy to chat with pretty girls. The appearance of such social platforms fill out their psychological gap in the simplest way.
If you want to be chased and worshiped like superstars, you just need to open the live stream. However, once you open the live stream, it indicates that you are willing to open up your personal life to all the public. What kind of people want his/her real-life identity to be fully exposed? Do they even have the awareness of the possible threats to their privacy? I could understand reporting your life to your close friends, but excuse me, the unknown public?
Luckily, I have a friend who is also the host of Inke. Every day, she lives her personal life once or twice a day. She does not do too flirty things, but she is obsessed with it any way. Every time, she just opened the live stream and chatted with others. Once I asked her about the reason behind that, her word is simple: I’m just bored, and want to be complimented.
Okay. The host is bored, the audience is bored. Boredom brings them together, and boredom uprises weird applications like Inke. If boredom has so much power, why people don’t something more normal, more positive, or healthy?
Social networking is so developing that people start to merge their identity in real life with the online identity. As for that boundary, while someone urges for the “real” self online, I stand with Mark Zuckerburg’s word: People is presenting and possessing their online identity. Compared to the total transparency, I’d rather be deceived by the wonderland people crafted online.
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