Social cognitive communication mechanism of digital participation in Chinese traditional music in the context of cultural identity and intangible cultural heritage
TL;DR
A four-layer architecture (input, participation, cognitive, and identity) coupled with a staged process model spanning information encoding, symbolic decoding, cognitive reconstruction, and identity internalization is developed, suggesting that audience cultivation and co-creation tooling deserve at least as much investment as interface refinement in the digitization of traditional music.
Abstract
Digital platforms have reshaped how traditional Chinese music circulates, yet the psychological mechanism linking user participation to cultural identification remains undertheorized. Drawing together social cognitive theory, contemporary cultural psychology, and communication theory, this study develops a four-layer architecture (input, participation, cognitive, and identity) coupled with a staged process model spanning information encoding, symbolic decoding, cognitive reconstruction, and identity internalization. A hybrid specification formalizes the mechanism, pairing structural equation modeling with attention-weighted neural aggregation; both components are estimated and validated on the same data. Empirical testing draws on 2,346 behavioral records from music, short-form video, and social media platforms, paired with 1,128 survey responses from users engaged with the guqin, Kunqu, pipa, and regional opera repertoires. Item loadings, heterotrait–monotrait ratios, collinearity diagnostics, and a common-method check document measurement quality. Results indicate that digital participation (DP) shapes cultural identity (CI) mainly through social cognitive communication (SCC), with the co-creation and dissemination strata showing indirect effects that are more than three times those of passive exposure. As the direct participation-identity path remains significant, the pattern is one of partial rather than full mediation. Cultural identity also looks more like a hinge than a terminal state: a chained specification linking identification to downstream cognitive engagement returns a reliable indirect path, which is consistent with the recursive reading the framework proposes but, on single-wave evidence, cannot establish it. Community climate exerts the strongest moderating influence, exceeding both platform affordance and content polish. Since the design is cross-sectional, all of these patterns are read as associations rather than as causal effects; even so, they suggest that audience cultivation and co-creation tooling deserve at least as much investment as interface refinement in the digitization of traditional music.