Cultural porters and banyun in Chinese fandoms on Bilibili
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2379Keywords:
Content creator, Digital labor, Transnational media flowAbstract
Banyun is the grassroots transnational media flow of foreign media content on Chinese platforms, particularly Bilibili. In this case study, we explore the role of the practitioners of banyun, the "cultural porters," in relation to other fans and the original creators of the "transported" videos. We propose to understand banyun in Chinese online fandoms as a practice of partial storytelling through free digital labor, which shapes interpretative frameworks shared among fans and facilitates engagement with the fan object. We find that porters can transform their identities from fans to influencers with great fluidity, but they are also confined by negotiations of collaborative roles and boundaries of power with the original creators.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Leiyuan Tian, Fan Liang
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
TWC Nos. 25 onward are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC by 4.0). For an explanation of the journal's reasoning, see the TWC editorial Copyright and Open Access. TWC Nos. 1 through 24 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, with TWC, not the author, retaining copyright.
Presses whose policies require written permission for reproduction should contact the TWC Editor; such permission is routinely given for no fee.