Networked conviviality: dining out together in the digital age

This study explores how diners interpret the experience of eating together in commercial hospitality venues shaped by ambient digital connectivity. While commensality remains a central ritual of social interaction, its meanings are increasingly negotiated in contexts where smartphones and digital media are ever-present. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, interviews with 28 participants in Australia were analyzed through the lens of four existential lifeworlds: spatiality, temporality, relationality, and corporeality. The findings reveal that shared meals are not fixed or cohesive events, but textured, contingent, and interpreted experiences shaped by evolving socio-technological expectations. Participants variously embraced, resisted, or redefined digital engagement, navigating tensions between attentiveness, autonomy, and performative visibility. To account for these shifts, the paper introduces the concept of networked conviviality: the relational and interpretive work through which diners co-produce and sustain (or fail to) the sense of togetherness a shared meal can afford, amid the ambient connectivity of a digitally saturated world. Rather than being eroded, conviviality is recast as a fragile and contingent achievement. These insights contribute to contemporary debates on hospitality, digital culture, and social rituals, and offer a conceptual framework for understanding commensality as a lived, negotiated, and at times mediated experience.