Vernacular Mythologies: Instagram, Starbucks and Meaning-Making by Non-Elites at Paris Orly Airport

Abstract

In the 1950s, the French philosopher, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes wrote a series of texts, published subsequently as the collection 'Mythologies' (1957), that constitute a dissection of French popular culture of the time. Barthes used theories embraced in linguistics, and his approach has been replicated over the years, but here I argue that the participatory web, and in particular social network services, offers us a perspective to rethink mythmaking by non-elites, thanks to the networked language and semiotic practices of Instagram users. In other words, and by invoking the Ancient Greek understanding of mythologies as the telling of stories, I look at how so-called ordinary citizens create a new set of myths by analysing the discursive presentations of a range of ‘things’ that individuals draw on at Paris Orly Airport. I explore how these ‘things’, and in particular Starbucks coffee, are explicitly made to carry meaning, according to the captions, hashtags, and emojis given by the original poster.