| Sumario: | This research unfolds a new form of TV viewing experience that has enjoyed increasing popularity over a decade in Asia media ecology, which is realized through a participatory commenting interface integrated into the streamlined platforms. By watching and discussing romance together through this design, audiences actively engage with the primary TV production afforded by this technology. To uncover how audiences construct gender images, articulate, and negotiate their own identity, I conducted a content analysis of a drama with the highest viewership (2019-2022) that induced contentious gendered debates on social media among half a million fans. Examining the comments, I found that Chinese audiences, emboldened by this commentary technology, make collective efforts to articulate and negotiate their gender and sexualities through the playful, carnivalesque, and affective comments, reorienting audiences' attention from the original drama. In this way, the creative and powerful meaning-making practices facilitated by the streamlined co-viewing experience supplant the traditionally networked and top-down communication dominated by institutional playwrights, producers, and directors in TV industries. Given the audiences' autonomy and participation, the study concludes that this embedded commenting design carves out a public space for audiences to exhibit heterogeneous emotions that reverberate in the communal virtual world, making the previously lone and passive viewing communal and connected.
|
|---|