Integrating digital media into everyday culinary practices

ABSTRACT

Food has emerged as a prominent subject in popular culture at a time when digital media is likewise assuming greater importance in everyday practices. With an abundance of culinary texts made readily available across many platforms, this paper articulates some of the ways in which audiences engage with these texts. Specifically this paper looks at how audiences choose between traditional and digital media, or combine traditional and digital media for the purposes of entertainment, or to aid in shopping, eating, and cooking. Guided by the theories of the domestication of technology, polymedia, and serious leisure, the insights of 20 people from 13 households, which were gathered through semi-structured, in-depth interviews, will reveal the ways in which digital media is integrated alongside traditional food media in everyday Australian households. Their practices show that rather than leave traditional media like cookbooks and television behind, the advent of digital media and processes of media convergence have played a role in reinventing or complementing some of the traditional ways in which audiences engage with food media.

KEYWORDS:

• Food media
• domestication
• polymedia
• serious leisure

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Tania Lewis and Michelle Phillipov for their insightful feedback that helped to refine this paper. I am also grateful for the time and feedback from Jason Sternberg, and Karyn Gonano.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Kirkwood

Katherine Kirkwood is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology. Her research examines everyday food culture and food media in Australia.