Hi everyone! Many of you probably already know this but I just found out a new interesting chrome extension called “Netflix Party”. It creates a chatroom that allows us to send messages & screenshots while we watch Netflix. Although this function is especially timely in this bizarre period of social distancing, watching videos plus texting has existed for a while. It variates in terms of whether the texts are public/private and one-off/replayable. For example, bilibili.com, a video-sharing website in China that is famous for its animation, comic and game videos, has a popular function of floating comments. Below is a screenshot from the last episode of The Prince of Tennis テニスの王子様. We can see people posting the date they watched this final episode in the texts flowing above the animation image. They accumulate through time and form an idiosyncratic viewing experience that marks a temporal dimension of the social tv watching.
Or, in some live streaming apps, we can interact with the live screaming host instantaneously through floating messages. The comments are one-off and only accessible to people also in the same chatroom.
What does this yoking (convergence?) of image and text say about contemporary video watching experience and culture? And how does it influence television industry and streaming platforms? These are some of the questions that I would like to think further.
The combination of watching and texting has been a popular form in internet culture, as you pointed out. While many television programs adapt the way to encourage user interactivity by incorporating Twitter or some social network service, the way streaming platforms like bilibili and nikoniko (Japanese video-sharing service) exhibit comments seems very different in terms of we can see the floating comments that are sometimes covering up the image on the screen. Also, the heavily used internet slang seems to premised on an entirely different communication style compared to the one of real life. In the case of nikoniko, quantitative and empirical research has been overwhelmingly popular in media scholarship in Japan, so the question you raised sounds exciting to explore to think about the social and cultural implications of the phenomenon.
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