Let's Eat Together

Eating shows, also known as mukbang, are audio-visual performances of (over-)consumption and prototypically show a lone mukbanger eating their way through a carnivalesque amount of food while simultaneously engaging an imagined audience via talk.The recordings are subsequently made available on online video sharing platforms (such as YouTube), where eating shows have gained widespread viewership.While previous research on asynchronous eating shows has engaged with the use of language to create intimacy, informality, and immediacy in prototypical, oneparty, shows, less attention has been paid to a particular eating show subtype, that is, multi-party mukbang, which put team performances on display.In this paper, I present a first investigation of eating shows with more than one interactant -a) two-party eating shows (where two participants, e.g., partners or friends, eat and interact with each other) and b) family eating shows (where parents and children eat and interact with each other) -and compare this to what we find in solo eating shows.Using four case studies, I illustrate the different participation frameworks (Goffman 1981) which can be found in the shows and analyze how the non-co-present viewers are linguistically and multi-modally constructed as ratified participants.I also show how byplay (i.e., "communication of a subset of ratified participants," [Goffman 1981, 134]) is used to create complex interactional set-ups; this plays a particularly important role in the family eating show in the data set.In combination with frequent footing shifts, this creates dynamic communicative situations revolving around food, eating experiences, and vicarious, digital conviviality and togetherness.