By 2017, he had helped more than 200 families from around 50 villages, including 40-something low-income families, to sell their agricultural products.

Zhou says it took the whole day for him to get from Nanchang, Jiangxi's provincial capital, to Jiang's remote hometown in the mountains.

"Yet thanks to the internet, people around the world get to know about the village and the story of Jiang," Zhou says, adding that for the first time he truly realized that the internet has brought people in urban and rural areas much closer together.

The internet has provided ordinary people with a new opportunity to achieve success, says Lu Su, chief technology officer of Ant Financial Services Group, one of the organizers of the exhibition.

The protagonists of the exhibition's 100 images come from 26 provinces and regions around China, as well as another 12 countries and regions such as Australia and Angola. Agricultural topics, start-up businesses and public-spirited activities mainly feature in the exhibition.

"It might be the first photo exhibition that aims to summarize ordinary people's life in the internet era," says Liu Yu, curator of the exhibition and director of the photographic center at the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.

Through the exhibition, audiences got to see how those daily routines, which are facilitated by internet technology that they might take for granted, have changed the life of another group of people in need.

War veteran Hu Dingyuan was born in 1920, and passed away earlier this year. In April last year, he finally got to host a family reunion that he had dreamed of for 77 years with the help of the internet.

He joined the army in 1940 to fight in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) before moving to Taiwan. Seeing his growing homesickness, in early March 2017, his 19-year-old step-granddaughter went online to help him seek out his lost relatives. With the help of volunteers, media and local government, he finally went home to Luzhou, in Southwest China's Sichuan province, mourned his parents and reunited with 80 descendants of his three sisters.

Xu Bin, director of the omnimedia video and photography department of Zhejiang Daily Press Group, the co-organizer of the photo exhibition, says that the exhibition illustrates that the leading characters in the continuing story of the internet are still the general public.

According to Liu, 20 of the 100 photos are going to be presented at the ongoing 2018 Baohe International Photography Week in Hefei, Anhui province, which started on Nov 23.

Contact the writers at fangaiqing@chinadaily.com.cn