The Interface Affect of a Contact Zone: Danmaku on Video-Streaming Platforms

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, danmaku. 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 danmaku 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 danmaku functions as a volatile contact zone among conflicting modes, logics, and structures 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. It generates tension and dis- junction as much as it facilitates flow. Because the intrinsic cultural and po- litical values of a platform are often ‘at odds with the values and preferences of the intended user base’, the global dissemination of such values should not to be taken for granted but has to be constantly negotiated by local users (Bodle 2010: 15). Therefore, a platform is not simply a technological facility that demands technical studies; instead, it constitutes complex performances, meanings, and knowledge of social acts that raise questions in specific social, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. If a platform, as both a concept and a structure, often entails discursive positioning of certain information politics through transnational/transmedial processes, how does the platform logic – the ‘platformativity’ – help us understand cultural localization of information- alism that runs across the playful and productive dimensions of today’s digital media?1 How does an individual user negotiate with, and make sense of, such discursive associations through active sociocultural practices that are them- selves codified by media platforms? To answer these questions, we need to look at the interface, where a user meets the platform, the content, and other users. As José van Dijck (2013: 29) points out, platforms codify social activities by ‘presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces’. If platforms program our sociocultural practices into computer architectures, then interfaces are where this process takes effect and manifests itself, because an interface is a discursive and affective space where we encounter, negotiate, and feel the material and symbolic milieus of a platform. Danmaku is one such discursive interface where different platform experiences and cultural practices clash and are reconfigured. Originally a Japanese term to describe a certain type of shoot’em-up games (a subgenre of shooter games), the word danmaku 弹幕 can be translated as ‘barrage’ or ‘bullet curtain’. The word is borrowed by the otaku community to describe a unique interface design featured by Japanese video platform Niconico that renders user comments flying over videos on screen (Figure 1).2 The danmaku interface is widely recognized as the defining feature of Niconico (Johnson 2013; Sasaki 2009). It 1 I borrow the term ‘platformativity’ from Joss Hands (2013a). 2 In Japan, the interface is simply described as コメン [‘komen’, comment]. And the word danmaku is used to describe a certain interface effect in which layers of comments fly over the screen at an overwhelming scale or speed, resembling danmaku games in which the entire screen is covered with waves of bullets. In China, however, danmaku, pronounced in Chinese as danmu, is used more generally to describe both the interface and the comments on it. In this paper, I use the word danmaku to refer to the interface. “Otaku” is referred to anime and manga fans whose community is largely transnational. Asiascape: DigitalDownloaded Asia from 4 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2017) 233-256 10:22:24PM via free access The Interface Affect Of A Contact Zone 235 Figure 1 Screen shot of a user-generated MAD video (a type of derivative video content) based on the anime series Toaru kagaku no rērugan, from Bilibili.com with over-the-video comments on the danmaku interface. allows viewers to input and share their comments in a seemingly synchronized manner with video streaming, supplementing visual content of moving images with paratextual information of peer interpretations and feedback and transforming video consumption into social communication. The comments- over-the-video function, which combines images with texts, the pictorial with the linguistic, also generates user participation that is decidedly multitasking – watching, reading, and writing an overwhelming ‘polyphonic representation’ with diverse types of media signals, evoking intense sensation of information immersion, creation, and navigation (Johnson 2013). The danmaku interface was quickly popularized outside Japan. It was in- troduced to Chinese audience through video-sharing platforms ACFun and Bilibili (known in China as ‘A-site’ and ‘B-site’), both of which were developed by and for Chinese otaku communities and are modelled after the platform design of Niconico. The interface of danmaku became so popular in China that it quickly spread beyond the subcultural community of otaku and was widely adopted by mainstream video-streaming services such as Tudou, YouKu, LeTV, and Iqiyi. By 2014, almost all major video-streaming platforms in China featured a danmaku interface, which is no longer a unique subcultural entity but has become a standard interface design in the Chinese online video culture Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (2017) 233-256 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:22:24PM via free access 236 Li at large. The popularity of danmaku also quickly spread to other media envi- ronments, such as social media (e.g. WeChat and Weibo), cinema, and television. In August 2014, three Chinese feature films – The Legend of Qin (Qin shi ming yue, 3D animation), Tiny Times 3 (Xiao shidai 3, romantic drama), and Brotherhood of Blades (Xiu chun dao, martial arts) – experimented with the danmaku effect in theatrical screenings. The audience could input comments using a cellphone, and these comments would appear on screen in real time. Though often dismissed as simply a publicity stunt, these three films’ experi- mentation with an alternative interface generated roiling discussions in the mainstream press and social media about the possibility of what would become ‘danmaku cinema’. A month later, TCL, a Chinese electronics manufacturer, launched a new model of smart TV that features a danmaku interface as one of its key innovations. The television set is linked to the social media platform WeChat to generate the danmaku effect, so that when you watch a TV show you can see your friends’ comments about the show on screen, which is advertised by the manufacturer as wei shejiao (TV + microsocial) (Tencent Technology 2014b). The transmedial spread of danmaku (from video streaming to social media to cinema and television) testifies to the modularity and malleability of digital platforms in the transnational context of media flow and highlights the ways in which diverse media experiences can be inscribed and transcribed onto the shifting surface of an interface. In order to understand this transmedial/ transnational process that is enabling and enabled by digital platforms and their cultural logics, this article examines the interface function of danmaku. It analyzes how danmaku, as a cultural and media interface, concretizes our localized relations to the transnational expansion of the fetishistic logic of in- formationalism that is encoded in digital platforms. In particular, the article emphasizes the fundamental incoherence and contradictions deeply created by the danmaku interface, questioning the long-existing assumption of con- vergence in media studies. Underlining the notion of ‘contact’ as the central logic of platforms, the article argues that danmaku functions as a volatile contact zone for conflicting modes, logics, and structures of digital media. Interfacing Transnational/Transmedial Platformativity Framing the audience’s interaction with media contents on multiple types of platforms through a layer of user comments, danmaku is not simply a computer interface but a cultural one. As a cultural interface that organizes transnational cultural activities (watching and commenting on videos)

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