Social media as taste re-mediators: emerging patterns of food taste on TripAdvisor

ABSTRACT

The current contribution provides insight into the transformations occurring in food taste and in gastronomy standards, where social media contributes to assess eating out in situations of mobility. The coalition between food and new media has brought about new priorities and standards in taste, relying less on proper gastronomic expertise than on media dynamics and ‘metamorphic’ claims of social distinction in these times of cultural omnivorousness. On this basis, the paper looks into emerging taste patterns, outlined by the widespread practice of sharing restaurant reviews on travel social media. It addresses both eating out and social media as an open set of social practices that, though highly dynamic and internally differentiated, speak for collective and socially organized patterns of behaviors, so as to become entry points to grasp broader social dynamics dwelling in connectivity, gastronomy, food consumption.

To this aim, the study analyses TripAdvisor’s reviews of the restaurants in the Italian region Aosta Valley in a time span of 25 months. The analysis highlights the process of food taste “re-mediation” played by social media and the emergence of a culinary capital based on plastic habitus and a plural socialization to food that ranges from TV foodtainment to digital narratives, to new patterns of aware eating.

KEYWORDS:

• Gastronomic rating
• social media
• TripAdvisor
• taste
• re-mediation
• distinction
• typical
• authentic
• experiential tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/press-releases?item = 125685 Last accessed September 19, 2019.

2. https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/press-releases?item = 125685 Last accessed on September 23, 2018.

3. https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/w765.

4. For a complete and recent review on this issue, we suggest to consider Colladon, Guardabascio, and Innarella (2019).

5. MALLET is a freeware available on this page http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/topics.php. (accessed July 17, 2019). It is “a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text”(Id).

6. Three of the restaurants included in our survey participated as contestants in the TV show “4 Ristoranti,” while the other one participated in a morning show.

7. An example is provided by the review of a restaurant that was on the TV show, when the reviewer says that they knew about the restaurant thanks to show; in an other case the reviewer says that watching the restaurant on the TV created some expectations further confirmed once ate there, and so on.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Giovanna Onorati

Maria Giovanna Onorati Onorati is a PhD-Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. She has coordinated a number of European research and education projects in the fields of lifelong learning and vocational education and training. Her major research areas are social change from an intercultural perspective: intercultural communication, social construction of taste, new media, food and media as factors of social innovation.

Paolo Giardullo

Paolo Giardullo works as postdoc research fellow in sociology at the University of Padova. He works at the intersection of Science and Technologies Studies and Environmental Sociology. Among his main research issues are digital methods for the study of cultural phenomena related to environmental issues and local development.