Relational Work in Digital Communication

Food blogging is a popular activity in online communication that brings together people with a shared interest in food and cooking. This book could be seen as a guide to the relationships food bloggers and blog visitors create, maintain, challenge and reconstruct with the comments they post. Examining 2,472 comments from ten amateur Greek food blogs, the book focuses on the relational work participants perform and arrives at the rather surprising conclusion that the most frequently appearing act, that of praising posted recipes and dishes, is here simply adequate and appropriate behaviour for food blogs that goes largely unnoticed and unanswered by bloggers. The book also discusses comments of polite behaviour and compliments, which go further than expected to construct relationships of closeness and solidarity among interactants.

The book argues convincingly that the least frequent type of relational work in the corpus is offensive behaviour and conflict, which sets Greek food blogs apart from other contexts of digital communication where impoliteness prevails. Through the polite or merely politic (appropriate) and rarely offensive comments they exchange, food bloggers and blog visitors construct for themselves a wide array of social identities which inhabit the world of Greek food blogs.