%0 Journal Article %A Chow Ow Wei %D 2024 %C Berlin, Germany %I Peter Lang Verlag %J Asian Musicology %@ 2832-1197 %N 1 %V 33 %T Paving a Path to Essentialize an “Imagined” Community: Inquiring the Contemporary Music Culture in the Digital Age through Virtual Ethnography %R 10.3726/JAM331_115 %U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1510523 %X This paper regards internet users who “convene” in moderated groups according to a common interest, social attachment, or other multiple intersected connections as an “imagined” community that surfaces on a social networking platform. The validity of the community, especially when being of an ethnographer’s interest, is argued through a documentation of responses captured and operated as ethnographic data. This is a preliminary study of music culture in the digital age through online survey as virtual ethnography to explore a glimpse of the reality via reactions of an “imagined” community. Through a systematic and critical presentation of the ethnographic data, music culture in the contemporary time is interpreted as a trajectory which significantly essentializes an “imagined community” as genuine as a physical field site in the light of cultural musicology. %K imagined community, digital music culture, virtual ethnography, the internet, social network