Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520390621)

We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In this book, Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance that combines logics of neoliberalism, practices of psychologized person-making, and persuasive capitalist interfaces. By highlighting the damaging effects of this current arrangement, Healthy Users charts a path that will change how we understand and study social media well-being in the future.


Author: Niall Docherty
ISBN-10: 0520390628
ISBN-13: 9780520390621
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 05/20/2025
Pages: 345
Format: Hardcover