Barrage: Youth Subculture In The Digital Media Age

Barrage culture, emerging from barrage websites, is a cultural form that is more deconstructive, more subversive, and more jocose. It is different from the mainstream culture, and even different from the well-known online culture. Specifically, it is a kind of younth subculture with the nature of "fans' culture" produced by subcultural youth groups who love ACG and make use of the barrage as the core function of the digital media to deconstruct cultural industrial products and to reorganize them by collaging, in this way, the youth groups achieve a reconstruction of meanings, an identity for their groups and some entertainment .The study of the barrage culture is of great significance to grasp the causes, media, forms, groups and mechanism of Chinese contemporary youth subculture.From the theoretical perspective of the youth subculture, the core question of this paper is to explore what have been deconstructed by the barrage culture, and what has been constructed in the same process .This paper is divided into three parts :The first part,from the perspective of cultural origin ,explains the development of the barrage websites,tries to clarify the extension of barrage culture and the main body of the barrage culture.On this basis, The second part focuses on thorough cultural analyses of the barrage.Firstly, this part is to grasp its spatial structure from three aspects: the access mechanism,discourse rules and discourse object. Secondly, this part dissects the characteristics of youth subculture, taking code production, code enhancement and code carnival as examples. In the end of this part, the paper analyzes cultural meaning by evaluating the status of young barrage users' the self-identity and the identities between them. The third part reflects on the barrage culture in the context of digital technology and post-figurative culture. This part affirms the barrage culture's cultural support for young groups as well as the reference it provides for the mainstream culture, it also alerts us to notice the inherent cultural shortcomings of the barrage culture at the same time.This paper holds the views that youth subculture has substantial commercial potential and will create new capital market because of the natural connection between mass culture and Internet. Barrage culture achieves the results of cultural reconstruction by the means of cultural deconstruction. Barrage culture indicates and also confirms the trend of non-confrontational relationship between subcultures and mainstream culture:the two are no longer in an "either-or" dichotomic relationship,but can co-exist as different cultural choices for subjects to choose with free will.