#Duet me: TikTok as a virtual traditional music community environment

Abstract

#Duet Me is a masters thesis that explores FolkTok, which is a community on TikTok surrounding traditional folk music, as well as the virtual sense of place that this community inhabits. FolkTok exists as an extension of physical world music communities, as people from various such social environments use TikTok to communicate with each other, and to share their experiences and repertoire. Yet it also exists as a separate place in a posthumanist cyborg sense. FolkTok is not merely a matter of mediated communication, but it is itself the thing that would be communicated, being a concrete social environment in spite of its lack of biology or physicality. These conclusions are supported by fieldwork in the form of participant observation and interviews with community members. This work largely took place in 2021, which is the timeframe on which this thesis specifically focuses. II