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.
Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.
"Niall Docherty has given us a rich, nuanced intervention into the cultural conversation of 'healthy use' rhetoric around social media. This is a must-read for those interested in the intersection of 'neuroliberalism' and platform culture."—T.L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT
"Docherty offers a powerful critique of how the harms of social media have been conceived as an individual matter. This compelling book provides valuable tools for understanding and resisting contemporary framings of what constitutes healthy social media use while exposing how governments and tech corporations are implicated in the current digital well-being crisis."—David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media, Music and Culture, University of Leeds
288 pp.6 x 9
9780520390621$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
May 2025