Youth Online Cultural Participation and Bilibili

This chapter examines one of the most popular youth open platform and video site in China, Bilibili, in which instant, bullet-commenting technology is built in to enhance the participation of the online users. Facilitated by this specific interactive technology, the new form of online commenting system embedded on Bilibili allows members to post and share videos—from self-created ones to illegal Japanese animation—and to engage other participants on an equal basis. As a subcultural space, Bilibili enables youth to organize their own community. In addition, it provides the technological infrastructure for the youths to play with certain form of public discussions. In careful examination of youth cultural practice and its wrestling with commercial force particularly, this study argues that the carnivalesque in a subcultural territory, though a de-politicalized public space, embrace potentials of cultural and political resistance toward capitals and dominant power by ways of poaching and transcoding them into their own subcultural context through online chatting and comments.