Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A distinctive university BBS culture in China today is the college students use a film’s “nonsensical?language to successfully create their own language style in the university-based BBSs. The author’s research on this phenomenon intends to answer the following two questions: first, how does this youth cultural style come into being? And second, how does the BBS cultural participants make use of this language style? Data presented in this paper were collected from face-to-face in-depth interviews with fifteen student BBS users and downloaded posting and discussion thread from three Chinese university BBSs. Discourse analysis is used in analyzing the data. Key arguments are as follows: first, youth style constituted by the commercial cultural products is still meaningful because young people have agency which enables them to construct alternative standards of usefulness, pleasure, or aesthetics; and second, the language style strategically created by the university BBS users finally accumulates into subcultural capital used as distinctions between the insiders and outsiders of the BBS community; while on the other hand, it also served as a cohesive force within the community.