The Role of Influencers for Young People and its Consequences for the Development of Teaching Competence in Nutrition and Consumer Education

In our digital multi-option society, material, social and emotional needs are satisfied to a significant extent through offers from the profit-oriented and highly digitized market system. Social media emerges as a relatively new meta-level between market and consumer regarding the complex factors influencing individual consumption routines. Social media influencers are a central factor in these dynamics as they serve as points of orientation for young people, who are regularly exposed to influencer content on social media platforms and the values and ideologies they reflect and reproduce. Young people’s consumption choices regarding nutrition, too, are significantly influenced by their socialization on social media. For nutrition and consumer education, this means that educators need a deeper understanding of the impact of influencers’ media content on the nutritional and consumer behavior of children and adolescents in order to grasp their key role as reference points and symbolic power. The EKo-K.I.S.S. project, supported by the ‘Zukunftsfonds Steiermark’, addresses this issue by developing media-didactic concepts for nutrition and consumer education at schools and universities based on social science studies. This paper contributes to this project by addressing the role of influencers and its implications for the development of teaching competence in nutrition and consumer education. Based on results of a quantitative survey amongst Styrian pupils and educators, it shows the importance of this topic in education and points out ways of integrating it in educational practice.