Grazing the Green Fields of Social Media

Abstract

Cows with Instagram and Facebook accountsOn Instagram and Facebook, accounts created by the Swedish dairy industry are made to look as if there are cows behind them.With these accounts, the dairy companies communicate through the cows, addressing the visitors in the way a person would. is chapter is about these accounts which have become a highly successful part of the dairy industry's marketing strategy.1 It deals with how the relations between humans and other animals are configured in these online spaces, how specific images and narratives of these relations are produced and legitimized, and what these images and narratives suggest in terms of the power relations between humans and other animals.Questions are also asked about what social positions are available for the cows in the marketing spaces of the dairy industry and with what consequences for real cows?Two social media accounts of the Swedish dairy industry are analysed.One is from Instagram and is called Bregottfabriken@Instagram 2 .It is an account promoting Bregott, a bestselling brand of butter produced by Sweden's largest dairy corporation, Arla.e other is a Facebook account of the Swedish dairy company Hjordnära, 3 which is a branch of the second largest Swedish dairy corperation, Skånemejerier. 4 Popular media images and narratives are crucial parts of the processes in which the norms that govern the relations between humans and other animals are established and sustained (Molloy, 2011;Malamud, 2012).Several animal studies and critical animal studies researchers have been looking at how other animals figure in different fields of media and popular culture (Squire, 2012;Packwood Freeman 2009;Herzog and Galvin, 1992;Arluke and Bogdan, 2010;Lerner and Kalof, 1999;Phillips, 1996;Spears et al., 1996;Glenn, 2004).Farmed animals rarely figure in the news or in TV shows, but rather frequently in advertisements for food products (Phillips, 1996;Molloy, 2011).Hence, where farmed animals are concerned, advertising is a particularly important media setting to analyse, as

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