A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Instagram Food Blogs

Abstract

Instagram is one of the social media platforms that cater to the users with infotainment, blogging opportunities, freedom to start or promote businesses, and so on. In addition to these functions, it opens the window to free marketing and advertising. To engage its users, Instagram uses various kinds of semiotic resources, making the content aesthetically appealing. This paper examines how Instagram food blogs control the masses by re-contextualization of discourses to promote neoliberalism and unequal power relation by exploiting multimodal resources. The qualitative content analysis is performed keeping in view the research questions: How various semiotic approaches are deployed by Instagram food blogs in Pakistan? How re-contextualization is used as a marketing tool in food blogs? How food blogs are a source of neoliberalism in Pakistan? This research is conducted to make the implicit impact of the social actors explicit in the context of Instagram food blogs and to unveil the neoliberal market hidden under the cover of infotainment. The descriptive exploratory research design is utilized and the qualitative content analysis is conducted by using posts from six Pakistani food blogs with wide followership. The theory of social semiotics by van Leeuwen (2005) along with notions from Machin and Mayr (2012) is used as a framework to carry out multimodal critical discourse analysis. The analysis shows that food blogs employ visual semiotic resources (images) and verbal resources (captions) to entrap the audience and inject a consumerist ideology in them that promotes neoliberalism in society. The study concludes that bloggers act as social actors who direct the actions of the audience by making capital out of semiotic multimodal resources and it manifests unequal power relations in society because the audience act as consumers and bloggers act as social actors. This research is intended to create awareness by highlighting the changing dimensions of power relationships in the digital world of the 21st century.