Presenter: Zihan Xu

Put Title Here: Social media promotion vs. Offline promotion: Audience perspectives of Chinese Music Diffusion

Type of Presentation: Poster

Abstract

This research proposal is based on my interest in the influence of social media in culture diffusion, especially Chinese music. Studies in this area often focus on the transformation of the performing and diffusing platform from offline to social media, and they also examine the influences of this transformation, but less attention is given to the audience perspectives. Existing research does not fully analyze audiences’ explanation, feelings and comparison in this transformation, and how they think about the way Chinese Music diffuses and performs. This led to my research question: How does the audience explain the influence of social media to Chinese music diffusion compared to the researchers and professional workers? The research method will be a qualitative method. Data will be collected through interviews from Chinese audiences of different ages and genders. The resources of discourse analysis will be collected from research articles. I expect the findings to show that there are differences from audience perspective and researchers perspective, especially the bias of the way Chinese music performs. This study is limited to the quantity of the audience joining the interview, so it does not include all different personalities of audiences and nations.

Biography

Zihan Xu is a first-year student in the Vantage One Science program at the University of British Columbia. Her research investigates the influence of social media on the diffusion of Chinese music in the perspective of users. She is personally interested in this topic because she is extremely passionate about music and believes that it can heal the soul without boundaries. At the same time, she has been a user of various Chinese social media platforms for many years. This time, she hopes to explore the complex connection between music and social media from different perspectives.