Information-sharing platform Douban has a group where people post photos and strangers comment on them, rating their appearance. The group has nearly 30,000 members, the majority of them female.

A photoshopped image can help a person win virtual admiration for his or her appearance. Besides beauty, winning recognition in real life is also a matter of money, status and career achievement.

Therefore, social platforms have become an important channel for people to be appreciated through images alone. To meet the general aesthetic standard influenced by photo editing software, there are also cases of those who want to become Internet celebrities undergoing plastic surgery.

Wang Minan, a professor at the School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, said posting life's moments or photoshopped pictures have become part of people's lifestyle on the Internet. Though that may not reflect their life, for those who have many followers and get a lot of praise and thumb-ups from them, the virtual world becomes real.

The influence of images in social life was proved in 2015 when the Oxford Dictionary announced the laugh-cry emoji, which shows a face laughing and crying at the same time, as its word of the year. It was the first time it chose a pictograph and not an actual word. It was a signal that interpersonal communication is undergoing a radical change.

This is an edited excerpt of an article originally published in Lifeweek on January 25  

(Print Edition Title: Social Life in Virtual World)