Essena O'Neill - Blog Post #4

Essena O’Neill, the 19-year-old former Instagram famous model, started to gained popularity at the age of 16 when she devoted countless hours to social media. Her lifestyle represented on Instagram appeared to be what most would call the ideal life. To travel, meet equally as beautiful people, and to be praised constantly for her looks, all while being paid appeared to be a successful and comfortable lifestyle. Although this life of luxury was what she had strived for since the age of 12, she soon realized that it was a life she did not want. She admitted that all of her photos were edited and that she would spend hours each day trying to capture the right shot so that she could post it on social media. Sometimes, she would meet with other Instagram famous people just so she could take pictures with them and get more followers and more likes. These relationships were not real and she soon began to realize that the life she aspired to was just a ‘fake reality’.

In her last YouTube appearance, Essena creates a 20-minute video regarding her stance to quit social media all together. She began by telling the viewers that a career built around social media is not sustainable. “How do I make money in the future?” she started to contemplate. Essena said she had it all and was signed with one of the biggest modelling agencies in Australia allowing her to have immense power, fame and wealth. She was even dating a guy that she felt was hotter than her and was ‘more successful’, yet he was more depressed and unsure of his life than her. She goes on to say that everything she was doing was edited and contrived to get more viewership and the bases of what she was doing wasn’t natural but had an intentional purpose. Her agents would tell her what to say, when to post and how she needed to edit her photos.

The overall theme she reiterates is being “defined by numbers”. She became depressed and the only way she would feel better about herself is through the likes, followers and up praise she would get by peers. Essena started to realize that this was not the purpose of life and that she had spent countless days on absolutely nothing. Being a model stopped her from being the person she wanted to be at the age of 12. She wanted to create art, was into writing and poetry, as well as reading. These hobbies did not exist after the age of 12, as her life became consumed by the screen. Therefore, she removed herself from all social media platforms in order to reconnect with the ‘real world’.

In regards to Van Dijck, Essena O’neils recent actions is definitely a characteristic of the “neoliberal economic principles” of culture of connectivity in contemporary. As Van Dijck states, “sociality us not simply ‘rendered technological’ by moving to an online space; rather, coded structures are profoundly altering the nature of our connections, creations and interactions” (Dijck, 20). Essena’s nature of connections became altered as she heavily focused on social media and screens in order to increase her online popularity and followers. Her ‘creations’, being her photos, were fake and a false representation of her body, mental state and lifestyle. This online space allowed for her everyday interactions to be molded and focused on intangible aspects that was brought onto her by social media. As Essena stated in her YouTube clip, “You do not have to go on social media to connect. You don’t have to prove your life on Instagram to prove it’s a good life. You don’t have prove your body for you to feel beautiful”. Through this realization she has cut out this neoliberalism approach to connectivity altogether and is experiencing life like she should of from the age of 12-years-old.