Everyday digital engagements: using food selfies on Facebook to explore eating practices

ABSTRACT

This article uses ‘food selfies’ posted on social media as a means of exploring the changing spatio-temporal characteristics of eating practices. It is inspired by a research that views the digital practice of posting food selfies on social media as a complex socio-cultural phenomenon. In this research, images of food and eating or ‘food selfies’, posted on Facebook were used to follow the eating practices of university students on and off campus. This article argues that such digital methods not only offer an innovative means of capturing social practices in motion, but they also reveal hidden or ignored aspects of practices that may not be evident from conventional methods. In particular, I argue that the affordances of social media platforms such as Facebook enable privileged access to people’s everyday social practices. The article proposes that such digital practices provide an on-going method of research that may offer institutions access to real time and archival data that is neither spatially nor temporally constrained.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital ethnography
• food selfies
• social practices
• social media
• Facebook

Acknowledgements

This research is part of my doctoral research, which is funded by the Sustainable Urban Precincts Program (SUPP) at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Thanks to the editors of this special issue, Michelle Phillipov and especially Tania Lewis, also my supervisor, for various forms of help, support, feedback, and guidance. Thanks must also go to my supervisor, Yolande Strengers for her constant guidance and support. Thanks also to the anonymous referees whose feedback has no doubt strengthened the quality of this article. I am grateful to Paula Arcari for spending her precious time in editing this article. Most importantly, I am indebted to my research participants who patiently posted and participated in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sustainable Urban Precincts Project, RMIT University;

Notes on contributors

Bhavna Middha

Bhavna Middha is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Urban Research at the RMIT University, Melbourne and is a member of the Beyond Behavior Change research group. She is on Twitter as @Bhavna_middha. She is interested in researching food, urban spaces, sustainable consumption, digital ethnography, and social practice theories.