When Old Meets New. The Demonstration of Traditional Slovene Dishes and Locally Produced Food on the Internet

摘要

Living with the Internet and communicating in cyberspace have become everyday praxis and our new reality. Even very intimate fields of culture, such as food, love, sexuality and family life, have become important parts of the new media and means of communication, often under a veil of anonymity. As virtual worlds develop on the Internet and become more integrated into people's daily lives, it is necessary to examine issues concerning how these online representations through the electronic medium affect people's social life and personal identities (Palmgren 2009, p. 20). Whenever identity is mediated in this way, it is also remediated because a particular medium is always understood in relation to other media both past and present (Waskul 2003, p. 3). Today, we view ourselves and our culture in and through media representations. We are not fully constructed by the media, since we also employ and work with these media as vehicles for defining personal and cultural identities. New media offer new opportunities for self-definition, and also for the presentation of culture (Bolter / Grusin 1998, p. 231). Food culture is an important aspect of the various kinds of cultural representations to be found on the Internet. It is sometimes portrayed as being apart of heritage, but in other instances it is presented in the context of fashion, creativity and modernity. Food is, like other fields of the material world, an object, which is experienced and filled with various cultural and social meanings, in relation to the social and economic status of a person, his or her ethnic or religious affiliations, gender, age group, and so on.