Exploring the Festival Attendees’ Experiences on Social Media: A Study on the Guangzhou International Light Festival

Abstract

This article explores festival attendees’ experiences on social media. Data on festival attendees’ posts on the Guangzhou International Light Festival were collected from TikTok. The Jieba Chinese word segmentation tool was applied to tokenize the texts and then classify the high-frequency words and phrases into five dimensions of festival experiences. The five dimensions of festival attendees’ experiences are cognitive, novel, affective, physical participation, and social interaction. A combination of the modularity algorithm and Gephi was used to cluster and visualize the festival attendees’ overall experiences and the different experiences in terms of gender and age. The results indicate that, in festival attendees’ overall experience, cognitive experience accounted for the largest proportion, followed by physical participation, and the proportion of social interaction, emotional experience, and novel experience was less. Moreover, the demographic characteristics of gender and age differ in the festival experience.

Piloting Test Scales to Measure Perceptions of “Liveness” Regarding ICT-Enhanced Performances at Music Festivals

“…The lack of significant differentiation in responses by gender regarding audience viewpoints contradicts suggestions that physical participation at music festivals is stronger among female attendees (Shuhua et al, 2023) and may support the latent potential for ICT-enhanced performances to increase inclusion and equality from a gender perspective. The successful use of the pilot scales in this research could support further development of an enhancement liveness scale that considers ICT-enhanced performances designed to improve accessibility for people who are deaf or disabled.…”

“…Mobile devices become lenses through which to experience music festivals and create additional content; to be viewed in real time "on site" at festivals or shared thereafter. Research into social media usage at festivals suggests physical participation is stronger among female attendees (Shuhua et al, 2023) whose electronic word-ofmouth posts focus on different aspects of festival experiences than male attendees (Ahn et al, 2020).…”