Designing “good taste”: A social semiotic analysis of corporate Instagram practices

Food is an essential part of life. It is also a well-known site where judgements about ‘good taste’ are employed for boundary-marking and class status maintenance. Today, much of this plays out through social media, where food is one of the most popular topics. With its strong emphasis on images, the photo-sharing platform Instagram is a perfect example of this practice. Grounded in elite discourse studies (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017) and Bourdieu’s (1984) classic work on taste, this paper examines how status and privilege are discursively constructed through the Instagram practices of the two major Swiss supermarkets Coop and Migros.

Portmann, L. (2020). Designing “good taste”: A social semiotic analysis of corporate Instagram practices. In Thurlow, C., Dürscheid, C., & Diémoz, F. (eds.), Visualizing Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives (pp. 203–226). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Visual extracts used in Figures 10.1 to 10.7 in colour (PDF)

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