Title: Virtual Ethnography of Chinese Jazz Culture Across Major Platforms: Memes, Posts, and Participation
Stream: Arts - Performing Arts Practices: Theater, Dance, Music
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Yufei Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Abstract:
In the past five years, there has been an increasing number of research papers on the virtual ethnography of jazz music and its fans, but there are almost no studies on the virtual jazz life of Chinese netizens. This article addresses the gap by analyzing platform vernaculars—memes, posts, commentaries, and forum threads—on Little Red Book, Douban, and Zhihu, and exploring their influence on recent jazz culture and urban life in China, at a time when a growing number of large outdoor jazz festivals are being held in Chinese cities, especially in Shanghai. Drawing on virtual ethnography and qualitative discourse analysis, the study compiles a corpus of over 300 discussion threads and associated comment chains, catalogs widely circulated memes (videos and animated GIFs), and conducts semi-structured interviews with influential jazz bloggers, thread initiators, and forum moderators. The findings suggest that online jazz lifeworlds mediate tensions between the artistic expectations of music fans and commercial expectations, translating digital discourse into offline participation and consumer behavior. This study contributes to research on jazz music platform cultures and digital urbanism in China.
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