Uses of Online and Offline Food Media in Denmark

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, whose interest is in how digital media might reconfigure the media system as such, and how that reconfiguration might also be a reconfiguration of cultural, social, and political citizenship. Her specific project is examining food and recipes on the Internet as well as in older media, building on interviews with practitioners in this field.

Recipes, of course, are a very old genre, and most people will have read a recipe at one point or other during their lives. They can be described in the first place as lists (similar to mediaeval household lists, lists of ingredients for medicines, or lists of instructions for scientific experiments); today, recipes are lists of ingredients as well as manuals for handling those ingredients.

There has been a recent food boom in the media, in fact – recipes are everywhere in both old and new media, and cover a wide variety of styles and cultures. Online, there are diverse commercial, institutional, and personal food sites and pages; on television, food programmes tend to address the consumer rather than the citizen, as Miller has observed, and popular media tend to disconnect more than they connect, due to the celebritisation of media content. Food can have immense political implications – in relation to the environment, but also in relation to bodily and affective identities, and ongoing discussions of public boundaries and public connectedness in the media.

So, Karen’s research examined Danish media users; here, in terms of general media use, gender didn’t make much of a difference, but age did – newspapers are a medium more for older users; magazines perform somewhat similarly; books and television also tend towards an older demographic, while the Internet is used more by younger users. For food and health issues, the pattern changes: magazines and the Net are the most important media here.

Further qualitative analysis is necessary here – and it shows that patterns of media use in relation to food and health information are very diverse, and not necessarily predictable by age or gender. Usage profiles are highly personal, with no clear trends; specific personal contexts need to be taken into account here. There may be a normative pull here, but it is unclear exactly how it affects people’s usage of food media. In particular, the boundaries between private and public are complex now, and there are seamless movements across these boundaries.