Integrating digital media into everyday culinary practices

Abstract

ABSTRACTFood 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.