Hi everyone, welcome to my Mukbang channel. Aloha chomp chomp.
My name is Laurensia Anjani and I'm a computer science student from NTU Singapore.
Now I am excited to show you the food that I bought today. I got chicken tenders, fish bits, and regular fries from Popeyes in this box.
So, in today's chomp chomp session I'm going to talk about my very first conference paper which is about mukbang. To be more precise it's about understanding the practices and motivations of mukbang viewers.
Mukbang is an online audio visual broadcast in which the host eats and interacts with the viewers through storytelling or live chatting.
The word itself is a combination of the word eating and broadcast in Korean and it is associated with three social contexts.
Which are the dramatic increase in single person households in Korea, the rise of Korean's youth internet culture and its ability to provide a sense of liberation from the social pressure to be physical attractive.
With so many different types of activities that you can stream online we feel that it is useful to understand how they manifest on the internet. It is because prior video stream research has focused on video game content.
So we make 2 contributions in this work. First, we contrast the practices and motivations of mukbang viewers with prior research on the social aspects of video streams. Second, we offer several design implications for video streaming experiences that go beyond game content.
For data collection I collected survey data from one-hundred and four respondents. I also had interesting interviews with fifteen mukbang viewers and from those results I got explore how and why people watch mukbang.
Some viewers stream mukbang as a mealtime companion especially when they eat by themselves.
And you know in this moment many of us are probably sitting at home and finding sources of entertainment from the internet while we are eating.
So this is also the time when remote commensality becomes more pertinent.
[P9] I found this one person. Her name is Stephanie Soo. She's my favourite because she talks mostly about conspiracy theory and unsolved mystery.
[P9] That's fun to have a story time when you are eating. Like a virtual conversation I'd say.
[Mukbang Streamer] So by all accounts she is a pretty normal person, but she was hiding a deep dark secret. And it was the fact that someone was stalking her. She didn't know who it was, but a man would always call her at the workplace.
While some people also see mukbang viewing as a private activity.
[P4] Yes, I do watch alone in private! It's almost like porn. I cannot watch it with somebody else.
And lastly, some watch mukbang as part of their leisure activity.
[P4] Sometimes when I'm going to bed I'm actually just watching mukbang videos.
[P7] I watch mukbang at night when I'm supposed to be sleeping and I'm hungry.
Now that we know how viewers watch mukbang lets find out why they watch it.
I classified their motivations into three themes.
Sense of connectedness to describe viewers who feel socially connected with the streamer.
Vicarious pleasure to describe viewers who feel sensorially engaged with the food or eating experience
And spectacle or performance to describe viewers who find the performance of the mukbangers entertaining.
Six of the people I interviewed felt a sense of intimacy with the mukbangers and they mainly admired them for their personalities, stories, or physical appearance.
[P15] I love watching HyuneeEats because she is a very polite and lovable person. I just love her, and I love watching Stephanie too because she is such a funny and sweet girl.
[P15] Also she mixes mukbangs with stories about crime and conspiracies. She is a very good storyteller.
The second theme is Vicarious Pleasure. Ten of the participants told me that they watched mukbang because of the vicarious pleasure that they could get from watching and hearing the mukbanger eat.
So, there are three aspects to this category. The first one is about Multisensory Experience.
A lot of mukbangers like to capture and emphasize their eating sounds, or when they are opening a package of food. These satisfying sounds are known as ASMR and here are some of the examples.
[intense crunching]
[intense crunching][mouth noises]
[intense crunching][mouth noises][chewing noises]
[box sliding]
[box opening]
[fingernails tapping on boxes]
[food scraping on box] [fingernails tapping on boxes]
[food scraping on box]
[P13] I think ASMR is the most important thing. You can actually hear every single bit of chewing and that makes you feel like you're doing it. It's so good.
The second part of the category is about virtual satiation, whereby some viewers watched mukbang to satisfy their food cravings or hunger.
[P10] I’m a Muslim, so during Ramadan I watch a lot of mukbangs because I can’t really eat during the day. So I like to see, like, maybe I can eat this later in the day.
The last part of the category is about viewers who had some physiological experiences after they watched mukbang. For example, they suddenly had cravings for the food that they saw in mukbang videos.
[P3] When I watch these videos, it definitely makes me want to go eat. If it’s seafood, it makes me wanna go eat seafood.
[P4] I watch a lot of noodles for some reason, because it makes like delicious noises and I like that. And I have noticed that I’m constantly craving noodles now because of the videos.”
The last motivation for mukbang viewing is about the spectacle of eating and the mukbanger’s performance.
I believe you would have noticed by now that the striking element from a mukbang video is the large quantity of food being consumed.
In North American culture, this extreme eating situation is typically reserved for eating competitions.
Moreover, since mukbang itself is like a performance, some of the participants place value on the overall performance of the mukbangers, such as their eating style, reactions to exotic food or struggles in finishing spicy food.
[P4] I like it too when the mukbangers eat sloppily. It’s real. I love it especially when they can’t control, it’s like noodles everywhere and sauce all over the place, and that’s hilarious and I love it
[P11] Just watching other people’s reactions is super interesting. To watch people doing these challenges, like the spicy challenges, is fun to watch.
Now that we have a better understanding on how and why people watch mukbang, we can see that mukbang addresses an array of viewers and it becomes like a single gathering place for a diverse set of viewers.
Based on this understanding, we imagine tailoring future streaming interfaces to address these different needs.
For example, through audio segmentation, developing multisensory simulation system, and improving remote commensality experience through blended reality.
So, mukbang is really an interesting lens to think about other kinds of streaming activities.
Understanding this design space provides a useful contrast to other online streaming activities, as well as suggests new design directions for streaming technologies.
I hope you enjoy today’s chomp chomp session with me and understand more about mukbang. Please feel free to reach me at laurensia.anjani@hotmail.com if you have any questions regarding the paper. And with that, I’m gonna end this video. Thank you so much for watching!