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.