The Andy Warhol quote about everybody in the future being famous for 15 minutes was as prophetic as anything Marshall McLuhan ever said or wrote, but the late Pop Artist’s elevation of the excruciatingly banal has perhaps been equally prescient. In our egalitarian world, talent really isn’t necessary to entertain any longer–just share your minutiae, just live in public. A few spectacles of prowess, like, say, the Super Bowl, still attract attention, but it’s the long tail or ordinariness that wins in the bigger picture. Case in point: In South Korea, that hyper-wired world, “performance eating” has become a phenomenon. It’s food porn, sure, but Stephen Evans of the BBC suspects more is at play. An excerpt:

How do you fancy eating your dinner at home in front of a webcam and letting thousands of people watch? If they like the way you eat, they will pay you money – maybe a few hundred dollars a night… a good salary for doing what you would do anyway. This is happening now in South Korea.

It’s often said that if you want to see the future look at how technology is emerging in perhaps the most connected country on the planet. The food phenomenon is called mukbang – a combination of the Korean word for eating (muk-ja) and broadcasting (bang-song).

I have seen this future in the eighth-floor apartment of Lee Chang-hyun in Seoul (pictured at work, above). At around midnight, he goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. “Perform” is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that’s part of the show. He’s invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.

This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily).

If the audience like the performance, they allocate him what are called “star balloons” and each of these means a payment to him and to the internet television channel on which he performs. He is coy about how much he earns but the BBC has estimated, by noting the number of star balloons on his screen, that it would run into several hundred dollars for a two-hour stint.

His performance-eating is part of a phenomenon which says something about the way society is changing and about the way television is changing – in Korea today, and perhaps, in your own country, tomorrow.•

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Andy Warhol eats a burger: