Eating together multimodally: Collaborative eating inmukbang, a Korean livestream of eating

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)*

The Psychology of Mukbang Watching: A Scoping Review of the Academic and Non-academic Literature

“…She examined the mukbang phenomenon in South Korean culture from a sociolinguistic perspective. Choe (2019) emphasized that eating together was considered a crucial aspect of South Korean culture that individuals go beyond sharing a table to as far as eating from the same bowls. According to Choe (2019), one important facilitation of mukbang was the fulfilment of an aspiration to eat with a company.…”

“…Choe (2019) emphasized that eating together was considered a crucial aspect of South Korean culture that individuals go beyond sharing a table to as far as eating from the same bowls. According to Choe (2019), one important facilitation of mukbang was the fulfilment of an aspiration to eat with a company. Choe (2019) theorized that as isolated Table 1 Publications that theorized or empirically studied psychological characteristics of mukbang viewers or consequences of mukbang watching (in alphabetical order of first author) Authors…”

“…According to Choe (2019), one important facilitation of mukbang was the fulfilment of an aspiration to eat with a company. Choe (2019) theorized that as isolated Table 1 Publications that theorized or empirically studied psychological characteristics of mukbang viewers or consequences of mukbang watching (in alphabetical order of first author) Authors…”

“…eating was increasingly commonplace in many regions of the world as well as in South Korea, mukbang provided a sense of social unity for those physically eating alone. Watching mukbang made viewers feel emotionally connected as if they were dining with someone (Choe 2019). Moreover, mukbang watching enabled a sense of co-presence among viewers via commenting with each other to eat food together while watching their favourite mukbanger (Choe 2019).…”

“…Watching mukbang made viewers feel emotionally connected as if they were dining with someone (Choe 2019). Moreover, mukbang watching enabled a sense of co-presence among viewers via commenting with each other to eat food together while watching their favourite mukbanger (Choe 2019). She also emphasized the role of mukbangers in providing a sense of collaborative eating via engaging in different eating actions participated by viewers, consequently resulting in an elevated connection between the mukbanger and viewers.…”