Author(s)

Weichen Ji, Yahan Hu, Ying Cong

Corresponding Author

Weichen Ji

ABSTRACT

This paper takes the online buzzword of “wage slave” as the breakthrough point and crawls the data of 200,000 texts on Sina Weibo, to explore the social mentality of the current young employees from two aspects of cognition and emotion by combining the Baidu index of “wage slave” and the sales volume of peripheral goods. It is found that the youth aged 20-29 in the southeast coastal areas are the major participants in this buzzword carnival of “wage slave”. The text content of “wage slave” is mainly self-mockery and teasing, but there are positive and mutually encouraging emotions and self-cognition behind teasing, which is an aggregation discussion of young working class in cyberspace, as well as a self-presentation of relieving daily work pressure in a more positive way.

KEYWORDS

Wage slave, Internet buzzword, data crawl, social mentality