Media Satiation

Last Updated (Wednesday, 29 October 2008 12:29)

Food, Taste and Lifestyle in Digital & Print

Karen Klitgaard Povlsen

How do we meet old media on the internet (for instance, magazines and weeklies, a fast growing field, digitally as well as in print)? How do we use the two media types together and separately – as producers and as users?

Do we talk about convergence, divergence, remediation – or something entirely different?
The focus of the project is on food, recipes, and the normative ideas of the good life, which thrive in these contexts. The internet and the print media are similar in many ways, but the material differences between the two media types do have consequences for transmitter and recipient, for content and aesthetic expression. The tendency is for the two to meet and combine, rather than substituting for one another. Commercial, institutional, and user-generated content and aesthetics mingle, most evidently on the internet, but also in print media. What consequences does this have for the production of the text to the users? Do we see an idea of cultural citizenship in the negotiations around ‘the good life’, and is this term negotiated emotionally and rationally? Food is strongly connected to an affective physical experience, and thus provides a fine case for investigating individual differentiation, as well as everyday routines. The survey poses these questions quantitatively, while this part of the project is a qualitative study of producers and users, based on interviews that are carried out in different media and over time, so this part of the project is experimental in its methodology.