Food Porn and the Invitation to Gaze: Ephemeral Consumption and the Digital Spectacle

Abstract

In the digital world, notions of intimacy, communion and sharing are increasingly enacted through new media technologies and social practices which emerge around them. These technologies with the ability to upload, download and disseminate content to select audiences or to a wider public provide opportunities for the creation of new forms of rituals which authenticate and diarise everyday experiences. Consumption cultures in many ways celebrate the notion of the exhibit and the spectacle inviting gaze through everyday objects and rituals. Food as a vital part of culture, identity, belonging, and meaning making celebrates both the everyday and the invitation to renew connections through food as a universal subject of appeal. Food imagery as a form of transacted materiality online offers familiarity, comfort, co-presence but above all a common elemental literacy where food transcends cultural barriers, offering a universal pull towards a commodity which is ephemeral yet preserved through the click economy. Food is symbolic of human solidarity, sociality and sharing and equally of difference creating a spectacle and platform for conversations, conventions, connections, and vicarious consumption. Food images symbolise connection at a distance through everyday material culture and practices.