The Enjoyment of Watching Other People Eat: A Qualitative Analysis of Young Turkish Mukbang Viewers' Motivations

With the introduction of social media into our lives, we are faced with different trends and themes of user-generated content. Mukbang videos, which are one of these contents published on social media platforms such as Instagram or YouTube, are remarkable in that they include a style of eating that may be enjoyable for some and disturbing for others. Mukbang is a video format that started in South Korea and quickly became a global phenomenon, where individuals interact with viewers while consuming large amounts of food. These contents, where food is used as a means of demonstration and social bonding, are an academically interesting and important research topic because they include many social and cultural dimensions such as digital consumption, social interaction, food culture and body perception. Based on the fact that these videos can also earn money for their publishers on digital platforms, this study examines the tendency to watch Mukbang videos from the perspective of young people and tries to understand the motivations of young people to watch these videos and what kind of pleasures they get in return. The data obtained from semi-structured interviews conducted with fourteen Mukbang followers that were selected by using a combination of purposeful and snowball sampling approaches, were analyzed in the MAXQDA program. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that young people learned about Mukbang videos through the "For You Page" of social media platforms, started watching these videos out of curiosity, watched them with the motivation to accompany or relax, gained virtual and spiritual satisfaction, and got acquainted with the dishes of different cultures that attracted their attention.