Where the world meets offline to discuss the online world

The true value of attending the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in person is that discussing online exchanges offline is, in turn, a perfect complement to online exchanges discussing offline exchanges.

That is, to stand both metaphorically and literally at the intersection of cyberspace and physical space, especially as they relate to cultural discourses. The WIC offers an opportunity to navigate the crossroads of human and artificial intelligences, and actual and virtual realities, and see with our own eyes and on screens how the World Wide Web accelerates the interweaving of local cultures into an interconnected global civilization.

These in-the-flesh conversations reaffirm that, alongside digitalization's transformative powers, there will forever remain value in meeting face-to-face and joining hand-in-hand to better see eye-to-eye. That's because, as the pandemic proved, the personal touch, in every sense of the phrase, can never be fully replaced with any number of ones and zeros.

One way we could think about such in-the-flesh cultural exchanges is like the ancient Silk Road, as if it were transported to today and then from now into the future, like a digital Belt and Road, especially since the international community has just marked the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative.

My thoughts about online cultural exchanges hark to the BRI a decade later, given that the video series I created for the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation — namely, the Belt and Road Bedtime Stories series — was among the most viral online media presentations related to not only the event, but also the BRI in general at that time.

It rapidly racked up hundreds of millions of views and was reported by all major media around the world, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Associated Press, CNN, BBC, El Mundo, Al-Jazeera and Der Spiegel.

One of the points of this series, and the sequel during the second forum, was to emphasize that the BRI is about more than just transportation infrastructure to advance trade in goods, but also about people-to-people and cultural exchanges.

This will ultimately be its legacy, which — especially through the internet — will proliferate immediately and then persist for centuries, or even millennia.

While few of the tangible cultural items, like silk and porcelain, that were traded among civilizations along the ancient Silk Road, physically survive today, many of the intangible cultural products that moved along these trade routes psychically remain — be they religions or recipes, musical instruments or culinary ingredients, artistic styles or mathematical concepts.

No matter who or where you are on this planet, these cultural exchanges have shaped your life since you were born and will continue to do so for your children, their children and then those who are born after them.

This phenomenon is only set to accelerate and expand, as the physical items traded along the BRI will wear out long before the cultural concepts that are shared through the initiative and the internet. That is, the ballpoint pens shipped from one country's port to another will run out of ink before the artistic concepts these civilizations draw upon and exchange through people-to-people and social media platforms.

We're speaking of such exchanges along the Silk Road as they were transferred millennia ago at the plodding pace of a camel caravan — not at the speed of 5G that connects a growing proportion of our planet today, in a world where more than half of human beings enjoyed at least some internet access as of last year, and at rates set to continue to increase exponentially.

For all of human history, so many peoples have spoken their own distinctive dialects in their respective regions. But now, all of humanity speaks to one another in a shared language of ones and zeros, not only rewriting the cultural exchanges of today's world but also their legacies beyond tomorrow, for the world yet to come.