"It's a Kind of Art!": Understanding Food Influencers as Influential Content Creators

Although the number of influencers is increasing and being an influencer is one of the most frequently mentioned career aspirations of young people, we still know very little about influencers’ motivations and actual practices from the HCI perspective. Driven by the emerging field of Human-Food Interaction and novel phenomena on social media such as Finstas, ASMR, Mukbang and live streaming, we would like to highlight the significance of food influencers as influential content creators and their social media practices. We have conducted a qualitative interview study and analyzed over 1,500 posts of food content creators on Instagram, focusing on practices of content creation, photography, staging, posting, and use of technology. Based on our findings, we have derived a process model that outlines the practices of this rather small, but influential user group. We contribute to the field of HCI by outlining the practices of food influencers as influential content creators within the social media sphere to open up design spaces for interaction researchers and practitioners.