Expert appetite: an exploration of doing and documenting 'healthy living' online
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2012
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Abstract
Healthy living blogs (HLBs) are web sites with a healthy eating focus, where (mainly) women post photos and recipes of their meals and discuss their food-related aspirations and experiences. The growing readership of these blogs reflects the current reimagination of health expertise to include new sources of authority that are steeped in specific and strategic textual and visual representations of the self and "healthy living." This research looked at sixteen popular HLBs to discover visual and rhetorical expressions of expertise, eating and self-improvement, before closely examining four widely-read blog posts to uncover how discourses of healthy eating are taken up by bloggers and readers. This study found that blogger expertise is contingent on particular visual and textual strategies, that members take up scientific and alternative discourses of eating in specific and competent ways and for particular purposes, and that there are tensions in practices of documenting and doing "healthy living."
Description
Bibliography: p. 138-141
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Citation
Dixit, J. (2012). Expert appetite: an exploration of doing and documenting 'healthy living' online (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/4701