I definitely believe that Essena O’Neills most
recent actions actually fit into to Van Dijck’s neoliberal economic values of
the culture of connectivity. I think that Van Dijck has an excellent grasp on
the idea that the competition and hierarchy of this ideology is incredibly
important (21). I believe that Van Dijck
argument is firm grasp on understanding why anyone gets involved with social
media. O’Neills is simply apart of the system of social media.
The culture of social media in the
neoliberalist way that Van Dijck explains, takes an alternate route to
understanding that Essena O’Neills gives for finally ending her account on
social media. O’Neills suggests that the great pains that she took in order to
make her life look more wonderful that it actually had been. She also mentions that
social media is not real life, and I have a bone to pick with that because, as
Van Dijck shows that social media is about connectivity. Connectivity is as
real as being punched in the face. It matters not what the content being
produced in a medium is, but how that content is conveyed over and over again
until it is believed to be real. O’Neills however, has not quit social media
entirely, she has developed a new Instagram that promotes the bigger issues. I
don’t think she was tired of not representing herself accurately, I think she
was tired of representing content that was losing to other content. As Van
Dijck suggest, social media is based on hierarchy, power and rankings.
O’Neills to me seems like she got tired of the
competition that she was in, during the time of her previous social media
account. The constant pressure to produce popular content has seen her
discredit the “fake lives” of other Instagram stars. Whether users understand
that Instagram is real or not real, the message they are receiving is largely
based on the form and not the content, the form of social media is the issue
for O’Neills. She is still using Instagram to support the causes that she now believes
in, which could be as real or as fake as her account was before. She just found
the right time to decide to quit the race she could never win. Van Dijcks
neoliberalist logic shows that the form of social media belongs to the winner
and Essena O’Neills simply found another way to try and become a winner.
Works Cited
Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of
connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Although I agree with your post, I do have to say that I think that aspects of social media can be fake or not reality. I think this because the things that you post on social media could be very much real like a car, a person or an activity, but they may not be YOUR real life. They may be someones real life, but this is where the line becomes thin. The things that Essena was posting on social media were not the things that represented her and her life, they were the things that others wanted her life to be like.
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