Stance-Taking in Bilibili Bullet-Screen Comments: How Chinese Youth Express Ideological Positions Online
https://doi.org/10.65281/660554 Author:First author:Liu Ru , Ph.D.graduate, School of Marxism, Qufu Normal University, the research direction of youth ideological and political,Rizhao 273165,Shandong,China.Email:LR2027@qfnu.edu.cn Second author: Huimin Zhang, Female, Master Candidate, School of Marxism, Changchun University of Chinese Medicine, Changchun, Jilin 130000 China *Corresponding author:Jingjie Pang,associate professor,School of Marxism,Anhui Medical University, Master degree in Ideological and Political Education, specializes in ideological and political education and medical humanities. Email:pangjingjie@ahmu.edu.cn Acknowledgments: Research Funds: 1. “Institutionalization of Free Targeted Medical Education in Rural Areas: An Empirical Study on the Four-Dimensional Synergy Model for Ideological and Belief Education” (Project ID: 2023AH050533), a 2023 Key Scientific Research Project in Anhui Province’s Higher Education Sector (Philosophy and Social Sciences); 2. “Empowering Rural Free Targeted Medical Students’ Labor Education with New Quality Productivity: A ‘Four Beauties’ Practice Education Model” (Project ID: 2024jyxm0796), a 2024 Key Teaching and Research Project under Anhui Province’s Quality Engineering Initiative. ABSTRACT Bilibili’s bullet-screen comments (弹幕) show the viewpoint of young Chinese users about ideology. In this paper, a total of 15847danmu from the popular video-sharing siteBilibili over the time of 2022 – 2024 is analyzed from the viewpoint of DuBois’s Stance Triangle(2007) and Appraisal theory(Martin & White, 2005). We found out there are 4 main strategies, when it comes to what kind of words young people use: the same emotions, which we also call affective alignment; how they talk about their feelings as young people; showing you are in a group, with “you all” or by speaking to each other; and sarcasm and irony. In the data, affective expression rather than explicitly ideological statements predominates as the patriotism content, and an ironic, humorous stance-taking is more commonly used for social commentary. These are indicative of a type of ideological speech act which is both playfully and seriously engaged with, through the real-time, ephemeral nature of danmu. We are saying that the way you take the stand is following some bigger changes on how younger people say something on the internet. Keywords: stance-taking; danmu; youth discourse; Bilibili; appraisal; pragmatics 1. INTRODUCTION Anyone who’s seen videos on Bilibili knows how it works: text rolling past the screen and people reacting in the moment (or at least feeling as though they are reacting in the moment) to the same parts. This bullet-screen comment system, called danmu is now central to how young Chinese viewers watch and engage with videos. with more than 336 million monthly active users and close to 86% of them under 35 years old (Bilibili 2024), the bilibili platform turns into a meeting point for youth culture, new forms of speech and ideology. What we are interested in here are the stances that users take in these brief comments. The audience who type out ‘破防了'(defense broken)after seeing a documentary on the veterans or ‘YYDS’after seeing an Olympic event is not simply leaving a comment, but also positioning themselves and evaluating, as well as aligning or disaligning with the others. This is stance-taking in Du Bois’s (2007) sense, a public act of evaluation, positioning, and calibration with respect to others. However, the study of stance-taking in Chinese digital contexts is still patchy. The most work has been on Weibo or WeChat, platforms with other affordances and users (Herring, Stein, and Virtanen 2013 for CMC pragmatics more generally). And Danmu is quite different: comments are fleeting, over the top of what’s visible, and create this strange sensation of being in the same place, even if it has been days or years. How people will show what their thoughts are about certain things. In terms of the current study of stance-taking of Bilibili danmu is mainly concentrated on how young users cope with ideological land. We have asked the three questions: •What strategies are used by the users when taking positions on ideological matters in danmu? •How do these differ across content type (patriotic, social commentary, cultural). • How much do youth specific linguistic resources play a part in this process? Let us note from the outset what this study is unable to achieve. We can’t know what a person actually believes or intends—only the public performances of those beliefs and intentions that they give in discourse. And we cannot claim representativeness to all Chinese youth, the users of Bilibili tend to be young, well-educated, and from cities. We can offer a close-up of language use in a corpus of 15,847 comments using the theories of stance and appraisal. 2. BACKGROUND AND PREVIOUS RESEARCH 2.1 Stance in Interaction There is a long history of discussing stance in linguistics, but Du Bois’s (2007) is especially productive. He argues that stances are constituted of three things going on at the same time: an evaluation (of some object, along some value dimension), a positioning (of oneself as a kind of social actor), and an alignment (with other people). Three of them make his so called “stance triangle” That is what captures some that a more simple view of attitudes, opinions and so do not. Positions are dialogical by definition. When a Bilibili user posts “这格局太大了”(“this vision is too big”), he or she does not only appreciate the video content, but also claim the identity of a person who can recognize and value such qualities, and they are implicitly aligned with (or invite other viewers to align with) people who share such appreciation. Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory can be used to complement the means by which stance is encoded linguistically. Their framework distinguishes three systems: the affective one (attitude), the judgmental one (judgment), and the appreciative one (appreciation), on the one hand, and how speakers engage dialogically (engagement) in the other. And finally, they also talk about graduation, which is about how evaluative meanings get scaled up and down. It has been used with different genres, but not so much on CMC in Chinese. 2.2 Pragmatic Identity in Discourse Chen Xinren (2014, 2018)’s works on pragmatic identity could serve as another valuable perspective. Identities for Chen are not attributes but are the resources speakers create and use to interact.