Epistemology

Psychology

Communication

Social psychology

Physics

Conversation

Action (physics)

Quantum mechanics

Sociology

Social science

Embodied cognition

Agency (philosophy)

Gratitude

Philosophy

Language in Society

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 respon...

Eating together multimodally: Collaborative eating in<i>mukbang</i>, a Korean livestream of eating

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