Imagining Participation Under Platformized Conditions: Epistemic Self-Positioning in the Communication of Traditional Chinese Medicine Culture

Research on platformized communication often treats participation as a behavioral outcome enabled by interactivity and algorithmic visibility. This article argues instead that, in knowledge-intensive cultural communication, participation is shaped through a process of epistemic self-positioning through which users publicly articulate their perceived competence, legitimacy, and communicative safety when engaging with TCM-related content. Drawing on the concept of imagined affordances, the study examines how participation is shaped in the platformized communication of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) culture. Using Bozhou, a major center of TCM culture in China, as a qualitative research site, the study combines platform walkthrough observation, qualitative content analysis, and inductive thematic analysis of 650 publicly visible user comments collected across Douyin, Bozhou Evening News, and Bozhou Release. The findings show that participation is negotiated through three interrelated evaluative dimensions: perceptual orientations toward accessibility, emotional orientations toward identity and attachment, and action-oriented expressions of epistemic legitimacy and discursive risk. These publicly articulated positions are further recalibrated through platform feedback, including metrics, comment interaction, and institutional cues. By foregrounding epistemic self-positioning, the article extends imagined affordances from perceptions of platform functionality to judgments of participatory legitimacy and offers a process-oriented account of how participation is imagined, negotiated, and constrained in platformized cultural communication. As a qualitative study centered on one research site, the article does not claim statistical generalizability; rather, it identifies mechanisms that may travel across comparable knowledge-intensive cultural settings.