Cooking and Crafting in a Digital Economy: The Effects of Online Commodification on Leisure Activities

Growing numbers of people are commodifying their leisure activities on the internet. This article’s mixed-method study of French food bloggers and Etsy handicrafters focuses on the overflow of digital market work into amateurs’ domestic lives. Building on the sociology of ‘serious leisure’, the study examines the novelty of such social phenomena. We show that traditional serious leisure activities have already revealed comparable forms of overflow and similar motives for consent to such spillover effects. However, the study also brings to light three specific effects of online commodification on leisure activities: the new forms of extra work in which amateurs are involved, the transformation of the leisure activity, and the shortening of amateurs’ careers.