Beauty, nudity... now comes the third wave of the website click-rate pull: abnormality. Among other out-dated or surpassed Internet slapstick stars, a nova BBS shock jock, with her flood of online pictures, is "entertaining us to death" in an unprecedented mass-communication way that Neil Postman could never have imagined.

As a new popular BBStar, "Sister Lotus", as she is called, is neither the first nor the last to behave bizarrely to catch people's eyes. As a constant loser, according to her own biographical description, we can easily find a reasonable explanation for her "extraordinary" actions from the perspective of psychology.

Many of us failed halfway while pursuing a "super-ego" and most of us can get along with such failures in reality. Yet some have gone a bit crazy as a result of both liberation and collapse from permanent stress, nonetheless, it's better than committing suicide. She is not alone in just choosing to post some of her own photos, annotated with her self-evaluations.

Thanks to the overwhelming attention of the Internet supported by other paparazzi, she has brought a boisterous comedy marked by chases, collisions and crude practical jokes to a nationwide stage. Some people guess she would be less popular were she not so hardworking (at posting her pictures) or modest-looking, and others have seen it as the sign of a collective lack of stimulation in society.

They boosted her popularity by mocking her with the most creative lampoons. They enjoyed her freakiness and very soon abandoned her or found another superstition to continue the amusement. It can't be the usual way that they treat a loser or a weak girl in their real lives, while on the Internet it has become a "comedy of violence" by unconscious majorities.

Entertainment upgrades while social conscience degrades. Who should be embarrassed by this farce? It can't be our heroine, and the only point I am sure about is that the media, very insensitively this time, has played the role of ignominious hustler yet again.

Pleasant banter is normal in our real lives and in the cyberworld. But what makes such a mass of people so addicted that they totally ignore the vulgarity and ruthlessness of this kind of amusement? It isn't difficult to touch people's empty souls and hidden evil by considering this event as a sociological phenomenon.

On one hand, high culture has faded away in this age of overload. People tend to keep their interests and tastes simple and then can't help sliding into vulgarity. This is so evident you can see it at once if you open a BBS forum and check out which topics are hottest. It is sad, but in my opinion there is no need to lament the situation, since mass culture by its nature contrasts with elite tastes and elegance. But it is still obvious that the prevalence of vulgar entertainment rots people's minds.

On the other hand, if we dig deeper, the case reveals the illusory superiority complex of normal human beings. Actually it is very difficult to define abnormality in psychiatry, but people take it for granted that those they think abnormal are laughable. The BBS nova in this case may be the least famous victim of such a "normality complex". Many so-called abnormal figures in history were deprived of their freedom of expression simply because their ideas didn't comply with the normality of their times.

It is a tragedy - threatening to develop into majoritarian violence - that people have immersed themselves in such "freak me out" entertainment.

(For more, see "Ego pays off"and "New order, or no order?" on pages 4, 5)