The WAU 2025 Congress (Antigua, Guatemala) webpage and call for panels are now open - Please visit waucongress2025.org for more info.

WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Digital Cacophony: nutritional culture and its sub-cultures on Brazilian social media.

presenters

    Vitoria da Silveira

    Nationality: Brasil

    Residence: Brasil

    PPGAS/UFSC

    Presence:Online

The digital world is vast and is expanding on the web 2.0 quickly. Social media has risen to be the most popular way in which information/contents are shared online. Amongst the contents shared, nutritional advice can be found as one of the rising trends shared. This trend became very niched, creating what we could call a functional cultural world (Wagner, 1981; Radcliffe-Brown, 1952). Although nutritional advice is under this culturally functional world, sub-niches or sub-cultures can be perceived, observed and mapped. Using the example of the influencers Paulo Muzy and Renato Cariani, we can observe how different niches are being mobilized to create an online persona that is slowly turning into specific individual social identities (Goffman, 1956). Cacophony plays a role here with its original meaning that comes from musical theory, when sounds don’t match at all but are put together as if they were in harmony. The online personas are not only in the nutritional niche but are also in the various niches or in this case sub-cultures, that are based in the way social media is being used in Brazil (Cesarino, 2022). Making it possible for said sub-cultures to have a divergence and create a cacophonous culture amongst the personas that are being created. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a debate about the concept of cacophony (Alves, 2023), do a definition of sub-cultures, and expose how influencers Paulo Muzy and Renato Cariani and their presence in social media, are examples of an intersection between the nutritional world and its sub-cultures in the digital sphere.

Keywords:

Digital Anthropology; Nutrition; Cacophony; Online Sub-Cultures;