Defining what a foodstagrammer is and other important terms
Is foodstagrammers a made up word? Possibly, so I will take time to define it along with any other terms that I will use throughout my ethnographic research.
Foodstagrammer is a term that has been spread throughout the internet to describe food bloggers. As the word is literally made of the words food and instagrammers, that is how I define it. A foodstagrammer in my eyes is someone that uses the social media platform of instagram to share photo’s of food. I will focus on a wide range of foodstagrammers from those who are just starting in the blogging industry to those with over 50,000 followers. This is where it starts to get tricky, for my ethnographic research I am focusing on those who use their foodstagrams to share local restaurants and cafes in Baltimore rather than those who are creating their own food. With recipe bloggers out of the way, I will be able to focus on a much narrower research group.
When I was little I remember going to new york at least ten times a year. My mom has always been amazed by the sheer size and scale of it. I remember her telling me that it would take a person 8,361 days to eat at every restaurant in New York if they ate at one for every meal. Although Baltimore is not quite at that level yet, it is growing and there are many new places to explore. Maybe some foodstagrammers will be tracing each other’s steps. That is something that I will discover while studying their Instagram habits.
This lead us to another term in need for defining. What am I talking about when I say I will be studying Instagram habits? By studying Instagram habits, I will be observing how consistently do they post, what hashtags do they post, do they market (link in bio and other marketing tools,) do they respond to comments on their photo’s, do they follow similar accounts, and many other questions.
One of the most interesting Instagram habits is foodstagrams marketing. By marketing, I am referring to their advertisements, collaborations, sponsorships, and other tasks. This is intriguing because this is how they make their money. While pretty much everyone I know has an Instagram account, not one of those people makes a living off of it. Although not all Foodstagrammers are full time bloggers, there is definitely a good amount of those who have quit their day jobs to full time blog. Sounds like the dream right, earn a salary by just eating and posting pictures of your food. But there are very specific measures that foodstagrammers take in order to be the best of the best. What are those measures? That is what I am trying to figure out.
I am curious to see if foodstagrammers share any similarities to journalists in Dominic Boyer’s “The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era.” Do foodstagrammers perform screen work regularly? Are they faced with tough decisions on what is Instagram-worthy rather than newsworthy? All of these questions will be answered throughout my ethnographic study.
