Everyday Digital Engagements: Using Food Selfies On Facebook To Explore Eating Practices

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.