"TASTE THIS VIDEO!": FACEBOOK VIDEOS AS EMBODIED EXPERIENCES.

“Mesmerizing”, “compelling” “daydream”, “escapism”: these epithets, employed by various journalists (Evans, 2016; Greenberg, 2016) were used to describe seemingly banal everyday recipe videos on Facebook. Recipe videos are short clips which show anonymous hands creating desserts, roast chicken, salads, and other culinary delights in less than 50 seconds. The journalists mentioned above were not impressed by the creativity of the recipes themselves, they could not even recall which recipes they had seen. Yet, they clearly remembered the kind of experience they had while watching, and the explicit compulsion they felt to watch more videos. Indeed, the compulsive character of the response they describe may have made recipe videos among Facebook’s most popular genres. In February 2020, Tasty – according to Socialbakers, the most popular Facebook community in the world – had garnered more than 100 million followers. Furthermore, Tasty's distinctive style had been imitated in other recipe videos Facebook Pages, in other genres widespread in social media, such as DIY videos, and in television commercials. This paper suggests the "mesmerizing" power of recipe videos is achieved through the way they use the social media interface to overtly address users' senses, rather than serve informational purposes, and create tactile experiences that embody users' presence in the virtual space.