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 and
Zappavigna 2018a) 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) (Zappavigna
2018) 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.).
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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