Study On The Use Of "Eating Webcast" And Its Impact On Mood Loneliness

As a kind of live food show,eating webcast has a large number of supporters.The dining table is a relatively private place,and eating is also a social behavior.When eating broadcasting moves the offline dining table to the screen,the change from reality to virtuality has been completed formally.Whether there is still sociality on the virtual table when users eat their dinner while watching eating webcast?The motivation of users to eating webcast,as well as the change of mood loneliness in the process,are also worth exploring.According to Zilboorg,loneliness has the duality of character and mood.Personality loneliness is manifested in the difficulty of establishing satisfactory social relations with others for more than two to three consecutive years.It is characterized by"long-term cognitive and behavioral deficiencies in dealing with others";Mood loneliness" is an emotion that may exist every day,and that emotion will disappear as others come to talk to us." Subsequent scholars classified mood loneliness into family loneliness(lack of family affection),romantic loneliness(lack of intimate partners)and social loneliness(lack of social interaction and integration).Based on this classification,this study explores the relationship between the use of eating webcasting and mood loneliness by experimental method,taking XX university students as the research object In the experiment,three groups were designed:Eat in dyads(the group eating when chatting between two acquaintances)Eat while watching(the group eating while watching esting webcast),and Eat alone(the group eating alone).After data processing and analysis,it was found that there was no significant change in three mood loneliness in the group of Eat alone before and after the experiment;family loneliness and social loneliness were alleviated to some extent,but romantic loneliness had no significant change in the group of Eat in dyad;family loneliness decreased significantly,but intimate loneliness and social loneliness did not change significantly in the group of Eat while watching.By sorting out the relevant literature of social psychology and mass communication,the author interprets the experimental results as follows.Firstly,the subjects and scenes of the host's eating webcast in the experimental study involve family many times,which may be the trigger of family loneliness.Secondly,through interviews with the experimenters of the Eating while watching,we find that during the use of the Eating webcasting,it produces parasocial interaction with the host,which generates"virtual companionship"and alleviates loneliness.The results of correlation analysis show that the decrease of family loneliness iin the group of Eat while watching is proportional to the degree of paraocial interaction of the broadcaster.The results also support the existence of"virtual companionship".Thirdly,gender is a moderating factor between different types of mood loneliness and parasocial interaction.Fourthly,family loneliness and social loneliness may have homology.On the basis of clarifying the influence of eating webcasting on loneliness,the author conducted in-depth interviews with 8 experimenters of Eating whlie watching and 6 non-experimenters in the original experiment,a total of 14 respondents to exploring the motivation of eating webcasting.The interview found that with the development of the diversity of content,eating webcast has the situation of concurrent ritual use and instrumental use,search for novelty,aesthetics and satiety are the main motives of users'Vitual use,while the accumulation of knowledge about food and the strategy are the two main manifestations of instrumental use of eating webcasting.After the introduction of broadcasting into China,it has gone through three stages:recording and broadcasting on website platform,live broadcasting on website/mobile Internet platform and short video transmission on social platform.The virtual dinner with the good companionship accumulated on the the live broadcast plat between users and hosts of eating webcast may be the continuation of the real meal.However,with the expansion of channel distribution path from live broadcasting platform to social platform,eating webcast has gradually evolved into eating shows,virtual meals suffer setbacks,and the sense of companionship is greatly reduced.