Expanding the spiritual festival space: The online event community of a Hungarian festival

This article examines how an event community emerges in the offline and online worlds through a two-step case study of a Hungarian rock-metal festival. The first step used semi-structured interviews and ethnography at the offline event to determine if there is an event community. The second step used netnography in the festival’s Facebook group to explore how the event community is placed to the online sphere. The analyses were inductive in the first step and deductive in the second step using content analysis by distinguishing themes and codes: community, self-identity, and spirituality/religion. It is argued that a community at the event characterized by the sense of sacred and spiritual experiences also appears on the online platform, creating community and self-identity, but the meanings of these elements are shifted in the online community.