Within a Carnivalesque Space: The Textual Identity of Danmu and the Rise of Mass Writing

ABSTRACT

Danmu is the Chinese pinyin of 弹幕, which is often used to describe the interactive, on-screen commenting system featured by both sub-cultural bullet-screen platforms and dominant video-sharing platforms. While the transformation of the power relationship between the public and the official and between viewer and author has received considerable scholarly attention, less attention has been paid to how the danmu system has affected the textuality of contemporary online audiovisual texts. Based on the Bakhtinian carnival, this paper explores the textual structure and signifying mechanism of danmu. It argues that danmu has dual textual identity, the paratext of online videos and the textual component of bullet-screen videos respectively. Danmu allows viewers to not only make comments on online videos but also reconstruct them. Such interactive construction of online audiovisual texts represents the rise of mass writing.

Keywords:

• Digital media
• Danmu
• online video-sharing platform
• the Bakhtinian Carnival
• textuality

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Dr. Patrick Adamson for proofreading this paper, and thank Prof. Di Zhan for his supervision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Notes

1 Users input danmu texts over the videos in the same way on both bullet-screen platforms (e.g. Bilibili and AcFun) and video-streaming media (e.g. iQIYI and PPTV), and the interfaces of these danmu systems are similar. Users can type in danmu texts in the blank area below the videos, and then, viewers can see them on screen. The only difference between the two different kinds of platforms is that bullet-screen platforms, especially Bilibili, attach much importance to the ethics of danmu users and use explicit written rules to drive users to use polite language.

2 See the official website of Bilibili https://www.bilibili.com/video/av8238065?from=search&seid=10252586945023402577, accessed February 2020.

3 See the official website of Bilibili https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep307609?from=search&seid=11072244499165777305, accessed February 2020.

4 See the report of Beijing News: The Popularization of Bilibili’s New Year’s Eve Gala: Times have Changed? http://www.bjnews.com.cn/culture/2020/01/08/671430.html, accessed February 2020.

5 See the official website of Bilibili https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV12K4y1K7gA?p=17, accessed May 2021.

6 See Why are Yang Mi’s feet thought to be smelly? https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1606866798795417996&wfr=spider&for=pc&isFailFlag=1, accessed February 2020.

7 See the documentary program Archives of Beijing Television on April 27^th, 2015. https://www.iqiyi.com/v_19rrnt8uos.html, accessed October 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by the School of Media and Communication, Shenzhen University.