Online Concerts Under The Perspective Of Interactive Ritual Chain

At the end of 2019,the COVID-19 pandemic came like a sudden "black swan",depressing the offline entertainment industry.The government’s temporary lockdown policies on large-scale social activities,limiting offline interactions and the movement of people in an effort to reduce the spread of the virus,has had a serious impact on many social and economic sectors.Due to the restriction of off-line activities,practitioners in the entertainment industry are joining in the competition of online content play and creativity one after another.Popular content forms such as online script killing,online concerts exploded in the beginning of 2020.Each platform gives full play to its own advantages,meticulously planning creative play from the aspects of technology,celebrities,models,themes,etc,to create online activities with strong public participation,promote the growth of this emerging industry,and open the "cloud" era of entertainment activities in a real sense.Online performance became the only option for the performance industry during the peak period of the epidemic.With the gradual recovery of the epidemic,the offline performance also adopted the flow control mode such as diversion,while the reduced number of participants was made up by simultaneous online performance.As a result,online concerts have become a common new experiment in the music industry throughout the pandemic.Based on Collins’ interactive ritual chain perspective,this paper considers "What ritual values are highlighted by online concert participants through remote interaction,and how these ritual values are formed in online concerts? How do these unique ritual values stimulate the emotional energy of the audience to achieve a highly cohesive interactive ritual?" these problems.In the specific analysis process,this paper takes all kinds of online concerts of different sizes conducted during the epidemic period as examples,analyzes the formation and evolution process of interactive ceremonies in the first,middle and last three stages of general online concerts on the basis of literature analysis,text analysis,and participation observation method combined with semi-structured interview method.The construction of symbols of groups in the online concert,the process of people’s emotional energy transformation,the formation of the sense of group solidarity,community moral sharing is analyzed,and the result of the interaction between rituals.Although,online concert interactive effects are less than offline,but still with the aid of cutting-edge technology extends out the new ritual value,has it special meaning under this epidemic normalized society.This paper is divided into five chapters.In Chapter one,the development status of online concerts at home and abroad,as well as their innovative points and development models,are reviewed in detail,and the two characteristics of flexibility and synchrony of online concerts are summarized as well as the three types of online concerts: star concerts,live music festivals and public benefit concerts.By the end of this chapter,the research methods and ideas adopted in this paper are briefly introduced,and it will run through the writing of the following article.The second chapter sorts out Collins’ Interactive Ritual Chain and its theoretical origin,as well as the research status of concerts,and then sorts out the phenomenon and theoretical research from the perspective of Interactive Ritual Chain.It is found that at present,domestic research results on Interactive Ritual Chain,a new theoretical perspective,are not rich and in-depth,and online concert research on this basis is still blank,which also explains the significance of this study.In the third and fourth chapters,the author divides the concert viewing process into three stages: the ceremonial prelude,the viewing process,and the interactive ceremony after the viewing.The two chapters compare representative concerts online and offline.The key elements that help people form emotional energy during different forms of concerts are analyzed in depth,and the interactive results such as emotional energy,group solidarity and group morality are generated.With the support of technology,online concerts can extend a variety of interactive play and ceremony scenes,which makes the audience and idol enter an interactive relationship that is difficult to reach in the past offline concerts.However,due to the lack of personal presence,the pace of interaction is slowed down.Finally,the fifth chapter and the conclusion summarize the research content and summarize the deficiencies of this research.Based on the comparison of online and offline concerts,this paper explores the unique ritual elements of online concerts,in order to discuss the necessity of online concerts in the epidemic environment.According to the analysis of interview data,the personal interaction effect of online concerts is not as good as that of offline concerts.However,due to the addition of technology,more ritual values and emotional associated elements have been extended,its transmission power transcends the boundaries of time and space and permeates the globe,which will become a normal existence in the post-epidemic era.The main problems of this paper is that it does not dig deeply into the value of ritual interaction extended by online concerts,and the research data are not perfect enough.The conclusion needs to be further discussed.