Parasite, Para-Text: Daguguguji’s Performance of Digital Identity

This article explores the digital identity of Daguguguji, one of the most famous microbloggers and microfiction writers on Sina Microblog. Despite having 3.9 million followers on Sina Weibo, his personal background remains veiled from the public. Daguguguji often refers to himself using nonsensical terms, animals, or neologisms irrelevant to his personal life, such as "a dog," "Zhang Dachui," "follow me," or "Zhang Wei." His profile pictures are not selfies, but images appropriated from other famous singers and writers, modified in a Dadaist style. Daguguguji's identity performance is substantially different from that of celebrities who use paratexts such as selfies and verbal descriptions to reveal their offline identities and inner selves. Instead, his writing can be conceptualized as parasitic use of the paratext, as the information displayed in his profile image, bio, posts, and reposts shows a parasitical mimesis of "who I am not," rather than an authentic self-display of "who I am." I propose that Daguguguji's identity performance is representative of the culture of anonymity in the Chinese mediascape, where netizens no longer seek to exhibit the "authentic self" but rather play with the "inauthentic persona," a persona parasitic on appropriated visual-verbal texts that are irrelevant to either their inner self or offline identity.