Slice of life in a live and wired masquerade: Playful prosumption as identity work and performance in an identity college Bilibili

Abstract

This article investigates Chinese urban youth’s mediated ‘slice of life’ and playful encounters as part of their identity construction and performance work on Bilibili, one of China’s most influential video-sharing social media sites mediating anime, comics, games and novels. Using a mix-method approach of digital ethnography, participant observation, interviews and data visualisation, this article examines fans’ hermeneutic practices through anime, comic, game and novel prosumption, exemplified by danmaku: ‘bullet screen’, barrage-like comments overlaid on videos. This article argues that Bilibili works as an ‘identity college’ for fans to perform various roles and explore their hybrid identities in a social-hermeneutic engagement process. In particular, the function of anonymous danmaku comments will be closely analysed as it offers a quasi-real-time engagement experience for fans and helps shape fans’ social self. Following a symbolic interactionist tradition, Mead’s ‘generalised other’ and Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are contextualised in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu where fans’ identity performance is regarded as masquerade. Departing from the moral panic rhetoric that Generation Z is ‘amused to death’, becoming ‘infantile and animalised’, or even enslaved by their desires and capable only of ‘cold intimacies’, the findings of this explorative study present a more complex understanding of Chinese youth’s identity work through participatory social media use and networked fandom.

Where translation impacts: The non-professional community on Chinese online social media – A descriptive case study on the user-generated translation activity of Bilibili content creators

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Serious Game Design as Research-Creation to Address Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

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Flying with two wings or coming of age of copyrightisation? A historical and socio-legal analysis of copyright and business model developments in the Chinese music industry

“…Based on in-depth interviews and case studies across different media industries, Zhao (2019) distinguishes the formal from the informal industry players, known as 'shanzhai' (imitation and local adaptation), and how these players transform themselves into legally trading entities in the platform economy. Chen (2018a) demonstrates how online platforms' rebellious and utopian endowments were taken advantage of and how users creatively appropriate and invoke the postcolonial, internationalist and socialist discourse with an aim to support the 'oppressed third-world' have-nots and have-less to continuously engage with and justify copyright violation and creative prosumption (Chen, 2020). The nationalist sentiment is ever stronger among Chinese consumers and arguably industries for domestic market appeal, given the protection enjoyed by Chinese domestic tech giants facing the turbulence and friction in neoliberal globalisation (Chen, 2018a).…”