The Construction of a Culinary Digital Persona in Food Blogs: Self-Presentation vs. Online Interaction

Food blogs are virtual communities and places of social interaction whose leader is the food blogger. This study conducts a discourse analysis on a group of food blogs to investigate the food bloggers’ strategies in constructing a consistent culinary digital persona (CDP). In food blogs, this canonically happens in the About Pages and in the Recipes Sections, namely, those parts that contain a ‘calculated’ self-presentation of the blogger, while the Comments Sections are seen as more spontaneous, interactive parts of the food blog. The study aims to ascertain whether food bloggers manage to construct a consistent CDP throughout their blog. Results, interpreted by means of politeness theory, show that the food bloggers present themselves as friendly amateurs but their real CDP of culinary expert emerges more clearly in the Recipes Sections and in the Comments Sections.