Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

A Study of Online Subcultural Groups' Emotional Climate under the Interaction Ritual Chains Theory

Zefeng GuChongqing Normal University*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

With the popularity of the internet, more and more social events and issues can be widely disseminated and discussed by people online. In a certain social background, a specific emotional climate will be naturally formed among internet users who share the same views or interests or cultural backgrounds, especially among online subcultural groups. Through the literature review, there is a large amount of research on online subcultural groups and research on emotional climate; however, there is very little study of online subcultural groups’ emotional climate. Therefore, this study will adopt the Interaction Ritual Chains theory to explore the online subcultural groups’ emotional climate. The research question is how the online subcultural groups’ emotional climate is generated. By taking online subcultural groups in two types of websites - the Bilibili website and pro-anorexia websites- as cases, the process of generating the online subcultural groups’ emotional climate can be summarised. This paper finds that multiple and multi-level emotion sharing triggered by a specific event among group members is the process of forming interaction ritual chains, and the reason why members’ emotion sharing triggered by a specific event enables the group to generate an emotional climate is that the emotional energy and symbols produced by the interaction ritual created in emotion sharing are successfully shared by the group members, which can influence the emotional energy of groups that on a social dimension can be seen as emotional climate.

Keywords: online subcultural groups; emotional climate; interaction ritual chains theory
Published: October 31, 2023
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/10/20231223
Volume: CHR Vol.10
pp. 27-33
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