Eating together multimodally: Collaborative eating in mukbang, a Korean livestream of eating
By Hanwool Choe. Language in society, 2019
99 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Mukbang is a Korean livestream where a host eats while interacting with viewers. The eater ‘speaks’ to the viewers while eating and the viewers ‘type’ to each other and to the eater through a live chat room. Using interactional sociolinguistics along with insights from conversation analysis (CA) studies, the present study examines how sociable eating is jointly and multimodally achieved in mukbang. Analyzing sixty-seven mukbang clips, I find that mukbang participants coordinate their actions through speech, written text, and embodied acts, and that this coordination creates involvement and, by extension, establishes both community and social agency. Specifically, recruitments are the basic joint action of eating, as participants, who are taking turns, assume footings of the recruit and the recruiter. The host embodies viewers’ text recruitments through embodied animating and puppeteering. As in street performance, the viewers often offer voluntary donations, and the host shows entertaining gratitude in response. (Mukbang, footing, recruitments, agency, involvement, constructed action, multimodal interaction, computer-mediated discourse)*
Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92887821b1a2f6fa2464a39f3425f392cf6ef0da
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In Literature and Literary Theory
Citations in the corpus
- The Psychology of Mukbang Watching: A Scoping Review of the Academic and Non-academic Literature (2020, background): “Choe (2019) further asserted that mukbangers helped satisfy food cravings of the viewers by giving them a vicarious pleasure of eating.”