The My Kitchen Rules (MKR) social group is able to utilise a variety of outlets to create and maintain a shared space, where opinions and information can be shared and heard equally.
Facebook is the most popular of these media outlets, where individuals comment, share images and status updates to impart their opinions in a collective manner, Rebecca Blood investigates this concept through “participatory media” (Blood 2004). Facebook enables fans and trolls to establish certain points of view on the actions of the TV Show. There is a high level of social interaction between the contestants of the show and the fans, with videos answering questions sent in through Twitter, further instilling a strong bond within the social group. The language used by followers is colloquial, making for a relaxed atmosphere, meaning that fans are more easily able to provide insight on several issues, applying their own personal experiences to educate fellow followers.
A fan sharing their view on the annual cookbook provided by the show in the form of a Facebook comment, sparking debate.
Twitter enables fans to make live comments on episodes, reaching a wider range of fans, who don’t necessarily follow the show on the various social media platforms. Also, through this, fans can collectively decide how a team cooked, becoming an integral part of the process of scoring contestants. Twitter explicitly caters to the main function of the social group, to allow for interaction between fans and the show, in this case referring to the contestants. Followers share images with fans and tweet at them, usually resulting in responses from contestants. Demonstrating emotional and moral support, allows for the fans to feel a sense of unity and community.
The MKR Instagram community utilises the image-only style of information sharing by sharing pictures that show the cohesive nature of the community in themselves. The inability to post longer captions on the photo’s, forces fans to quickly sum up the purpose of the image in a couple of short sentences. The service also allows for fans to make jokes about the contestants, which demonstrates the colloquial atmosphere shared throughout the community.
An example of a meme, made by a fan of the show
Yahoo7
Yahoo7 operates as a hub for the social group. Both Facebook and Twitter contribute to Yahoo7’s operations. As well as this, Yahoo7 enables fans to learn information about contestants and the judges, further developing the idea of an inclusive community. The service ‘You Be The Judge’ is the most cohesive aspect of the site, where individuals can convey their emotional support for contestants, as well as intellectual knowledge on the execution of a dish. Blood explains that there is a “community of readers that comments make visible” (Blood 2004).
Sources:
Blood, R. 2004, ‘How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 53-55.
THE COMMUNICATIVE ECOLOGY OF MY KITCHEN RULES 