Para-social interactions in Chinese audio melodramas

Audio melodramas of boy’s love have become a media phenomenon in China and have formed online communities on social media. This paper examined how these communities’ members interact in the listening process and trans-media extensions. This paper employed the concept of para-social interaction (PSI) to disentangle the novelty of PSI in the social media context. Nine thousand on-screen comments, three hundred comments, and a hundred posts from an audio melodrama The Untamed’s community on Sina Weibo were gathered and analyzed. The findings contribute to the theory of PSI and provide information about the question of whether our social relationship is becoming more or less authentic under the considerable influence of media expansion.