Mŏkpang: pay me and I’ll show you how much I can eat for your pleasure

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the production and consumption of live-streaming personal broadcasts, focusing on their commercial and economic aspects, as well as their interactivity with their users. Mŏkpang is a term that refers to ‘eating broadcasts’, in which content creators, called Broadcasting Jockeys (BJs), televise themselves while eating. Based on a case study involving in-depth interviews with three BJs and a shop owner, this paper examines how the BJs achieve their success (attracting a huge audience and earning a high income), and how their performances interact with the audience and the pay items purchased on the digital platform. We argue that the pay items, especially the ‘star-balloon’, have unique cultural meanings beyond capitalism. We then consider the cultural context of the viewers’ behaviour during the performance. This essay shows that live-streaming personal broadcasts are critical vehicles for analysing these practices – their production and consumption – in a digital space constructed via and beyond digital technology. In particular, mŏkpang attests to the way multi-layered interactions mediated by commercial devices are taking place with the cooperation of dining businesses, viewers, and BJs. The article also aims to inquire into the meanings of mŏkpang’s commercial and economic aspects, exploring how and why they build and strengthen their relationship with the imagined community. Finally, it speculates that mŏkpang is part of a network of communities that actually accommodate recent social and cultural needs in Korea.