The semiosis of digital commensality toward sustainable communication: A case study of Food-Related Applications using Instagram's Intertextuality

The rise of food delivery services as a fast growing online-to-offline e-commerce enables platform applicants to affect commensality by lonely or socially higher-level eating action in any tempo-local situations. The digital commensality refers to physically eating together (online or offline) with someone as a result of some digital technology-based intervention. The need to investigate the digital commensality of food apps through Instagram's intertextuality for a sustainable communication draws us for applying an integrated corpus-based model in multimodal (inter)action analysis framework; it enables the authors to study the irresolvable dialectic between social actions and mediational means to understand the importance of semiosis of digital commensality toward a sustainable communication. The semiosis of Iranian digital commensality in food apps via Instagram intertextuality provides insights for considering user’s signifying tastes and their habits regarding national socio-cultural activities relied on food system, including food type choices, ways of preparation, the eating arrangement and manner. The results show that while interactive signs of Easy-paz and Maman-Paz apps through Instagram intertextuality empower mediated actions to perform rituals and challenge for developing offline commensality, online commensality was developed by Mr. Taster app via influencing and by Maaii app through Muckbang. Furthermore, Delino, and Snap-food apps were found to be benefiting from mediated actions to perform online-to offline commensality by equipping delivery mechanisms on individuals eating activities.