A discursive media analysis of dumbeg platformization in contemporary food discovery on TikTok

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Traditional ethnic foods increasingly circulate through digital platforms, yet critical scholarship on how platform logics restructure their cultural visibility remains scarce in Indonesian food studies. This article examines dumbeg, a steamed rice cake from Rembang, Central Java, as a discursive site where the four institutional logics of the platform society, datafication, commodification, selection, and programmability, intersect with five centuries of ritual, ceremonial, and oral discourse. Drawing on a TikTok corpus of 62 videos (14,243,440 views, collected March 2026), the analysis treats engagement metrics not as marketing performance but as traces of algorithmic curation. A 12.8-fold visibility asymmetry between dumbek (Tuban) and dumbeg (Rembang) cannot be explained by historical depth or cultural significance; it is a constitutive effect of algorithmic selection privileging content that aligns with TikTok's platform vernacular. Three discursive registers, commercial-promotional, identity-curiosity, and nostalgia-heritage, reorganise heritage knowledge into platform-legible formats, while the embodied, gendered ritual knowledge of predominantly female artisan producers is systematically absent across all three, an absence we theorise as a domain of unplatformizable epistemics. The article argues that what appears as a digital promotion gap is better understood as algorithmic recognition asymmetry, with implications for how heritage food scholarship conceptualises preservation in the platform era.</p>