Abstract
This essay applies Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotics to “food porn” on Instagram, and this sign is an exemplar of the structure of all signs on this platform. Food porn is defined as triadic: (1) the food porn image plus the comments are representative of (2) the profile who posted the image (poster) for (3) another profile (ambient viewer) who thinks this relationship. From Peirce and Deleuze there are two main ways of thinking in signs and I apply them to food porn: from Peirce, comprehension is formal and the ambient viewer draws logical conclusions about the poster of the sign; from Deleuze, comprehension is creative and the ambient viewer can invent brilliant new concepts about the poster. It is not possible to extend my discussion to an evaluation of which mode of thinking is more typical today. This paper explicates Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotic systems to explain how we think with Instagram signs. Once we understand what we can do with social media signs, we can be more considered in what we’re doing with it.
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