Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (2017) 233-256 brill.com/dias The Interface Affect of a Contact Zone: Danmaku on Video-Streaming Platforms Jinying Li Assistant professor of Film Studies in the English Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
[email protected] Abstract This essay interrogates the transmedial, transnational expansion of platforms by ana- lyzing the mediation functions and affective experiences of a discursive interface, dan- maku. It is a unique interface design originally featured by the Japanese video-sharing platform Niconico to render user comments flying over videos on screen. The dan- maku interface has been widely adopted in China by video-streaming websites, social media, and theatrical film exhibitions. Examining the fundamental incoherence that is structured by the interface – the incoherence between content and platform, between the temporal experiences of pseudo-live-ness and spectral past – the paper underlines the notion of ‘contact’ as the central logic of platforms and argues that dan- maku functions as a volatile contact zone among conflicting modes, logics, and struc- tures of digital media. Such contested contacts generate affective intensity of media regionalism, in which the transmedial/transnational processes managed by platforms in material/textual traffic are mapped by the flow of affect on the interface. Keywords Chinese media culture – platform – danmaku (danmu) – digital media – interface – media theory. In a transnational media context, what drives the flow of culture and com- modities, as many have argued, is no longer the content but the platform – that is, the global expansion of networked mediatory systems, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple iOS. But this process of transnational expansion of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/���4�3��-��340079Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:22:24PM via free access 234 Li platforms is neither smooth nor homogeneous.