Abstract
With the surge of participatory culture and dynamic of media convergence, danmu have experienced their continued proliferation on East Asian online streaming. Facilitated by pseudo-synchronicity and congruency technologies, existing research has focused on describing and conceptualising the final product of danmu rather than being grounded in the empirical process of receiving danmu. We know little of how audiences perceive danmu and to what extent danmu affect viewers’ gratifications. Adopting an online-based experiment, this study contributes to examining viewers’ engagement with and gratifications from different types of danmu. It attempts to understand what types of danmu matter to the audience’s viewing gratifications in terms of its content and multimodality, and what (dis)connections can be observed between the audience reception of danmu and conventional subtitles. The results show that extra cultural information danmu stand out as the most gratifying type, significantly satisfying viewers’ utilitarian and hedonic needs for information and entertainment seeking. Scrolling speed and size are the two most influential multimodal factors in viewers’ gratifications with danmu. However, the potential connections between conventional subtitles and danmu depend highly on a video's content or genre.
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