AltaMira Press
Pages: 136
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-0-7591-2042-6 • Hardback • June 2012 • $99.00 • (£76.00)
978-0-7591-2043-3 • Paperback • June 2012 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
978-0-7591-2044-0 • eBook • June 2012 • $49.00 • (£38.00)
Signe Rousseau teaches at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the author of Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference (2012).
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Sweet but Sticky Web
Chapter 1: Food for Sharing
Chapter 2: Food Not for Sharing
Chapter 3: Twitter Feeding: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Chapter 4: Everyone Is a Critic (but Who Is This “Everyone”?)
Chapter 5: The Business of Pleasure
Conclusion: (How) Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think About Food?
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
This brief book illustrates how social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp, among other sites) have strongly influenced food culture. Rousseau (Univ. of Cape Town, South Africa; Food Media, 2012) invites readers to participate in a multilayered discussion of a wide range of issues related to the topic. These include plagiarism and copyright/fair use issues, restaurant reviews and the ethics of reviewing food establishments, marketing ethics, research strategies to locate authoritative recipes, and health information. This discourse is an entertaining, accessible analysis of an ordinary occurrence: sharing food with others through cyberspace. It is an incredibly engaging, fast read for such a dense, well-researched text. Foodies and academics in many disciplines will appreciate this book; it is also suitable for general readers, students, and anyone in the restaurant/hospitality industries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels of students, general readers, researchers/faculty, and professionals.
— Choice Reviews
Often, what we have come to term 'social media' actually reveal themselves to be quite a- or even anti-social in fostering narcissism, alienation, competition and so on. With judiciousness and even-handedness, Signe Rousseau unpacks both the perils and promises of new communication forms of the digital age and insightfully impels us to look closely and critically at the ways food talk today mixes business and pleasure, health and excess, self-interestedness and community, all at once. Hers is a highly ethical call to be responsible about the quite consequential media in– and of– our lives.
— Dana Polan, New York University
Finally, a thoughtful and imaginative book on how the new media landscape is changing the way we think, write, and talk about food! It is required reading for my graduate and senior-level undergraduate students.
— Krishnendu Ray, Chair, Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health, New York University; President, Association for the Study of Food & Society