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Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 5:2 (2022) ► pp.197–226

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Instagram and intermodal configurations of value

Ideology, aesthetics, and attitudinal stance in #avotoast posts

 | University of New South Wales
 | University of Sydney
Published online: 15 February 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00068.rap
Abstract
This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued food is the avocado which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism, clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to fitness. We explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in a corpus of 64,585 Instagram posts tagged #avotoast. The study draws on previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aesthetics in social photography (Zhao, Sumin, and Michele Zappavigna. 2018a. “Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie.” New Media & Society 20(5): 1735–1754. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to interpret the visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into intermodal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient affiliation (online social bonding) (. 2018. Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to understand how different values are construed in these texts. A modified grounded theory approach is used to isolate and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A particularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food consumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Enacting ideologies in digital food discourse
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Dataset and sampling
    • 3.2Linguistic analysis: The Appraisal framework and ideation-attitude couplings
      • 3.2.1Ideation-attitude couplings for exploring values in texts
    • 3.3Visual analysis of everyday aesthetics – amplified ordinariness
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Still life self images and amplified ordinariness
    • 4.2Hashtagged values
    • 4.3Aesthetic discourse invoking a moralising discourse
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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