Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse: Social Media Interactions Across Cultural Contexts

Exploring food-related interactions in various digital and cultural contexts, this book demonstrates how food as a discursive resource can be mobilized to accomplish actions of social, cultural, and political consequence. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how social media users employ language, images, and videos to construct identities and ideologies that both encompass, and transcend, food.

Drawing on various discourse analytic frameworks to digital communication, contributors examine interactions across a range of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram and from diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. From the multimodal discourse of a Korean livestreaming online eating show, to food activism in an English blogging community and discussions of controversial food imports on Omani Twitter, this book shows how, in digital contexts, language and multimodal resources serve not only to communicate about food, but also as a means of accomplishing key aspects of everyday social life. Highlighting how users display sociability and aggression, create and challenge identities, draw social and cultural boundaries, and convey political and activist stances, Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse examines the intersection of food and digital communication to illuminate the relationship between discourse, action, and ideology.