Chris Till
Social media has become central to many people’s everyday communication, education, and self-expression. Such platforms are undeniably significant in informing and shaping many prominent issues. We launched the Beyond Meat & Memes project to explore how the promotion of veganism functions online. In particular, we focused on Instagram and TikTok to better understand how the combination of text, image, and video work together. We explored the strategies, narratives, and messages which were most prominent during Veganuary 2024.
We found three main discourses. The first discourse displayed “animals are subjects”. This was articulated in many different contexts including through simple messages presented in an image macro format (a box split horizontally with two images, one stacked on the other and text at the top and bottom of the box) urging the reader to eat beans (presenting an image of legumes) not beings (an image of some calves). This discourse was also presented through more subtle challenges to speciesism such as in a video of a human being stroking a cow who is purring like a cat.
A second discourse construed “veganism as care”. This set of posts often represented people caring for non-human animals or rescuing them from being farmed, abused, or slaughtered. Non-human animals were frequently personified in this set through being referred to by name, attributed personalities, and given narratives (e.g. of their escape from abuse). They were also often framed as children such as being visually represented cradled in a carer’s arms.
The final discourse represented “veganism as vibrant”. Many of the posts representative of this discourse were food and recipe sharing posts or instruction videos. These show vegan food as colourful, diverse, and delicious with the subjects of videos having fun preparing and enjoying the food. This discourse was also present across other genres of posts (including some which also contributed to the discourses above) with a bright, colourful (often saturated) aesthetic being common.
The findings from Beyond Meat & Memes were much more extensive than it has been possible to represent here. For instance, we looked in detail at the kinds of subjectivities constructed for both human and non-human animals, rhetorical strategies, and specific uses of the affordances of the platforms. You can read more about the project on our website and publications from the project will be coming soon.