A: What's hot on Weibo?

B: I didn't check. I've decided to spend less time browsing the Internet and more time reading history books.

A: Why is that?

B: I don't want to be one of the pancake people, although everyone tends to in this Internet era.

pancake people 煎饼人 是指什么样的人？

My comments:

Pancake people, an Internet-age term itself, is obviously an apt one to describe young people of the Facebook and Weibo era.

And, as you may detect from the speaker’s tone, it’s not a flattering term. Pancake people, in short, are people who are shallow and skin deep, like the spread-out pancakes are – flat and thin.

As the Internet brings unprecedentedly vast amounts of information to us at every hour, we’re so inundated with it that we threaten to all become what are called jacks of all trades, who appear to be able to do everything but are in fact good at none.

Internet era or no error, this is the time we are living in. Therefore we’ve just got to take advantage of whatever information thrown out way and still try to be able to tell the chaff from wheat.

Or should it be the other way around?

I see too much chaff, apparently. Sorry.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（张欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.