Despite their many benefits, many of us intrinsically know that social media platforms are not entirely a force for good for human beings and our interactions. Use of social media is often linked with poor mental health, particularly in young people, and the kind of comparison it encourages between peoples’ lives can easily make one feel inferior, and exacerbate existing divides in society. And yet the advantages to these services are such that we continue to engage, perhaps trying to limit our own usage or engage with social media in ways that we deem to be the least damaging.
“These platforms have been designed to extract value from our interactions”, says Dr Niall Docherty, Lecturer in Data, AI and Society at the University of Sheffield Information School. “They’re capitalist platforms with an economic incentive at their heart, yet somehow the users have to navigate the pressures and extremes put upon them just by using their own wits.”
Dr Docherty’s forthcoming book, ‘Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-being on Social Media’ looks at the concept of ‘social media wellbeing’ and how these influential platforms and companies shape the way we live our lives.
“The book is going to explore the ways in which social media wellbeing has become a nexus around which people are prompted to live their lives in certain ways”, explains Dr Docherty. His research considers how social media companies, politicians, knowledge created through psychology and related disciplines, and other apparatuses of power interact with eachother, as well as how they play into the ways in which we’re all asked to interact with one another online, whilst also looking after our own health and wellbeing.
“Power is not something that a person wields or holds over someone else. It’s more about the ways in which we’re led to behave, think and interact in a certain style that serves certain interests”, Dr Docherty continues, explaining the Foucaultian understanding of governance and power in which his research is situated. “The book is about social media wellbeing as a conduit of power rather than a nominal state.”
Building on work started during his PhD at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory, the book is set to be published in late 2024 or early 2025 by the University of California Press.
Decidedly not a self-help book about how to actually practise social media wellbeing, the book will instead empirically analyse the ways in which social media users are prompted to become, in Dr Docherty’s words, “healthy, happy, productive users online”, and how putting all this responsibility onto the users themselves fits into a wider history of neoliberal responsibilisation.
Given the ever-expanding numbers of social media platforms in use and the many features contained within each, Dr Docherty decided to restrict his research to just one aspect of one platform: the Facebook news feed.
His analysis falls into three strands. Firstly, he looked at how social media companies themselves construct their hypothetical images of their ‘ideal users’ and talk about wellbeing. Dr Docherty looked at Facebook’s published literature on human-computer interaction and psychology (used to justify changes to their services), as well as their PR strategy, using a socio-technical script analysis method taken from science and technology studies. This method traditionally looks descriptively at how technologies are embedded in society, but here Dr Docherty has combined it with Foucaultian power and governance theory to add a political slant.
“Ever since my PhD I’ve been interested in trying to reconcile this seemingly objective sociological mode of analysis with a critique”, he says. With his book, he intends to demonstrate how this is possible.
Through this analysis, Dr Docherty found that Facebook’s overarching narrative was one intertwined with the neoliberal idea of ‘self-care’.
“They seem to be saying that as long as you’re interacting with people you love, limiting your time on social media and having meaningful interactions, then all your wellbeing outcomes will be fine”, says Dr Docherty. “It’s only when you start engaging in ‘passive use’ that things will go wrong”.
Neoliberalism has many definitions, but Dr Docherty aligns his work with the one given by Foucault: the application of market-focused ways of thinking to all domains of society, including those previously unrelated to the economy. Under this worldview, efficiency is the key to a happy and healthy society. First emerging in the late 1960s, this became an influential policy paradigm in the era of US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. They pushed for deregulation, a slimming down of the state’s role in society, and maximum market freedom.
“Neoliberalism is often considered to be a lack of state intervention, but actually it just reorders state intervention to prioritise market functions”, Dr Docherty explains. Beyond politics, Dr Docherty believes that culturally, neoliberalism supports competition as the key means of interaction and survival in all domains of life; selling your ‘brand’ in an open market of labour, of love, of friendship; competing for scarce resources; applying an economic principle to non-economic domains.
The second layer of Dr Docherty’s research involves a material analysis of how social media platforms themselves actively target their defined ‘ideal users’ and nudge them to behave in certain ways. Machine learning algorithms push certain types of posts over others to gain interaction, and Dr Docherty investigated this, as well as the technical architecture behind how posts are ordered and how the feed is laid out to draw attention to certain areas (e.g. the red notification alert). In addition to this, he looked at how wellbeing controls at user’s disposal are presented, such as screen-time-limiting services and push notification controls.
The third and final strand of the research was interviews with users themselves about how they manage their own behaviour online. After flyering for volunteers in cafes, pubs, health centres and yoga studios, as well as adverts on social media itself, Dr Docherty sat down with participants individually and had them scroll through their Facebook news feed, narrating what they saw. The participants would talk to Dr Docherty about their experience of their feed in terms of their wellbeing, noting what they did and didn’t like, allowing him to get into their mindset.
“Creating this artificial interview scenario created a rupture in the norm”, Dr Docherty says. “It allowed users to reflect on their interaction with the feed in a way that might not have been possible if I hadn’t been there.”
Regardless of their background, he found that a lot of people had pretty sophisticated awareness and critiques of the pressures put on them by social media platforms, and expressed a feeling of helplessness about being able to do anything about it. Many knew that limiting their use of social media would be beneficial, but noted that the control measures available to them weren’t sufficient, and weren’t working.
“The way social media wellbeing is talked about today very much puts it on the users themselves”, says Dr Docherty. “They have to just sort themselves out.”
Dr Docherty sees this as part of a wider historical context of ‘neoliberal responsibilisation’, which has already led us to notions such as ‘5-a-day’ for fruit and vegetable consumption, and ‘getting your steps in’ via step-tracking apps and devices.
“It’s survival of the fittest in a marketised regime of life, which is a wilful political decision that has become entrenched over the last 40 years in the West”, Dr Docherty continues. Social media isn’t something separate or new, but simply the modern continuation of this long process.
“Focusing all the pressure on the individual is basically saying that wider context doesn’t matter and it's only your fault if you’re feeling depressed online”, Dr Docherty says. “It tells you that it’s not the way the systems are designed, it’s not that you might be being subjectified in a certain way due to your race, class, nationality or gender - it’s just your inability to look after yourself.”
In our nominally meritocratic society, we’re pressured to maximise our lives in terms of our careers, our health, our relationships, and told that if we can be as efficient as possible in all of these spheres then we’ll be rewarded with success.
“That ignores the structural determinants of existence that make life more or less difficult for people”, argues Dr Docherty. “By saying everything is up to us, you foreclose the opportunity to critique the power structures that exist in the world.”
The intention behind Dr Docherty’s research is to push back against this, and aim stronger critique at the companies and governments failing to address these issues on social media. Platforms like Facebook make a show of outwardly welcoming regulation by governments, but they do so in bad faith, because they understand that in our current political paradigm, the regulation is unlikely to have any deep or meaningful effect.
On his impetus to conduct research in this area, Dr Docherty says “social media has never really sat well with me from a personal perspective.”
“I never liked the ways I was being prompted to behave online; even years ago when social media was first introduced, I never understood why I was being asked to present my life in a certain way. Being asked to share, comment and like things always felt alien to me.”
Historically, many people have said that social media is ‘just a tool’, and Dr Docherty felt that nobody was taking very seriously the idea that there might be more nefarious to it than that. Digging into these feelings and wanting to see where they came from led Dr Docherty to critical theory and culture studies.
“It allowed me to objectify my own feelings through a theoretical lens”, he explains.
This personal motivation combines with a political one to drive Dr Docherty’s research. He talks about wanting to push back against the “restriction of human life to neoliberal terms”. These feelings go back as far as his Undergraduate studies and, as such, by the time his book is published this may be the end of an 8 or 9 year journey into this research area.
By highlighting social media wellbeing as something that has been contingently constructed, Dr Docherty hopes to highlight the arbitrary nature of initiatives like these, set up by capitalist organisations to shield themselves from criticism and avoid having to make any meaningful changes to their life-altering platforms. Though Dr Docherty is clear that his book is not intended as self-help in an instructional sense, he still hopes to point out that the current situation isn’t the only way things have to be; if you feel bad as a result of your interactions online, it isn’t all your fault, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Political in the sense that it might open up new ways of thinking, Healthy Users is a book that may help to push us back to a position where we can formulate a new sense of our well-being online, and a new sense of what it means to be a healthy user.