Reimagining food pictures on Instagram: a social semiotic perspective

Abstract

In recent years, Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms. Among others, food pictures have been gaining popularity as a specific genre favored by youths to share the highlights of their daily life, by food brands and diners to promote their products, and by bloggers to attract public attention. In this sense, ‘food Instagramming’ has been conventionalized and prevailing as a social practice (Jones & Norris, 2005). While to date there has been no systematic study on food posts using a linguistic/discourse analytic approach, it is important to understand how they are composed and function in local and global contexts. In this study, Instagram food posts were collected from several young people based in Hong Kong and formed a corpus. The images, captions and comments were annotated and analyzed on the basis of their ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Whilst representing a usually augmented version of their everyday life (typically through filters and photo-editing apps), these food posts can also be taken as artefacts with meaning potential that index a specific kind of identity (Jaworski, 2010) in a neoliberal market. Partly under the influence of food bloggers and celebrities, these youths tend to authenticate their ‘foodie’ identities (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) by introducing, describing or evaluating the food they post to their imagined audience (Litt, 2012). The ‘likes’ and comments these posts receive also possess meaning potential, enabling the users to connect with other Instagram users in and out of their immediate circle but also gaining a sense of recognition and legitimacy. These food posts are not only the reflection of the young people’s lived experience, but also the products of the broader social, cultural, economic and political contexts they are situated in.