Atmospheres crafted by a range of personal, social, and material stimuli imbue consumption spaces with “qualities of feeling” that inform consumers’ behaviors and emotions (Böhme, 2008; Hill et al., 2021). During collective live events, the experience of atmosphere is shared among the consumers present in the space. Through the lens of sociological interaction ritual theory, a four-stage process underlining the emergence and intensification of social atmospheres was conceptualized demonstrating how the entrainment of consumers’ emotions and behaviors by a shared focus results in lively expressions of collective effervescence (Hill et al., 2021). The interaction ritual chain informing the creation of the social atmosphere was only evaluated within the context of spatially and temporally bound collective live events, leaving out its exploration in live events whereby consumers flow through the space along their own timelines. My qualitative study uses the context of music festivals to examine this gap with research rooted in an ethnography of Piknic Electronik, a seasonal Montreal festival. My findings reveal how spatially and temporally spread contexts distract shared focus among the consumers present, weakening the intensification of the social atmosphere and breaking down the collective manifestation of effervescence into smaller, lower-intensity peaks experienced to different extents among attendees. For practitioners, this research provides insight into managing points of tension that interrupt consumers’ entrainment and facilitating the flow of social atmosphere build up through the design of atmospheric cues in seasonal music festival contexts.
Keywords: interaction ritual chains, social atmosphere, music festivals, group consumption