Digital Connectivity

Digital connectivity has become central to the daily lives of billions of people around the world. Ironically the very ubiquity of digital technologies and practices make it increasingly difficult to research and write about the impact of the digital on everyday life. This chapter employs the growing digitisation of food—from consumers taking food photos and providing restaurant reviews on their smart phones to the impact of digital connectivity on both alternative food movements and agri-business—as a way of grounding and materialising our engagements with the digital.The first section discusses the rise of food photography on social media. The next section discusses the growing role of ordinary people as key participants in online food cultures via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. I then map the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of connection, creativity and sharing to the growing monetisation of digital food communities. The third section of the chapter turns to questions of food politics and the digital, and the constraints and affordances of digital connectivity in relation to food activism. The final section discusses the growing role of transnational corporate food players in social media space, and the limits of data sharing and so-called informational transparency in an era of data monitoring and “big data.”