Essena O'Neill: Blog Post #4

For most people, they view social media as a space to connect with other through sharing, communicating and entertainment. For others, social media is an enterprise where celebrity identities are constructed and maintained through an idealistic lens that is constantly consumed by their loyal followers. Last year, the social media star Essena O’Neill caused a big stir when she posted an exposed video of why she was quitting social media. She went on to explain the industry behind being a social media celebrity and how the life she was portraying online was not ‘real’ nor was it perfect. Instead she encouraged individuals to get off of social media and start living in the offline world. This decision by O’Neill can easily be linked back to Jose Van Dijck's concepts of the culture connectivity, more specifically the “neoliberal economic principles” of social media platforms.  

The neoliberal economic principals of the culture of connectivity stated in Van Dijck’s book are linked to a constant struggle for power. She states that, “Connectivity derives from a continuous pressure… to expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances” (Van Dijck, 2013, p. 21). This demonstrates that social media users are compelled to constantly engage with social media platform by updating their profile, by producing content that make their lifestyle seam desirable and envied. In O’Neill’s manifesto, she explained one incident where another social media personality asked her to start a fake relationship to increase their online presence. When talking about the man who contacted her, O’Neill wrote, “he said we’d have all this free travel, that if we became a couple we’d both bump up our followers” (Parkinson, 2015). This is the exact type of strategic alliance that Van Dijck was alluding to. Since both had large fan bases, by constructing a fake relationship, they have the potential to combine and increase their social media empires. The issue that O’Neill pointed out is that many unsuspecting and naive followers do not see the business behind social media and therefore believe these relationships to be genuine. This is one of the many reasons why she felt so passionately about exposing these power structures. O’Neill felt that it was important to remove the illusion that social media celebrities often construct.

Van Dijck does not just blame the pressure derived from social media on the technological platform, instead she sees this as having a deeper effect through ideology. Van Dijck (2013) writes that, “platform tactics… hardly involve contingent technological structures; instead, they are firmly rooted in an ideology that values hierarchy, competition, and a winner-takes-all mind-set” (p. 21). O’Neill discusses how the platform has made likes and comments into a currency that determines an individual’s self-worth. She explained how she often fell into this trap of letting likes dictate her status in society. This ideology is talked about by O’Neill when she pleads for people to instead of accepting the hegemonic ideologies of social media content, to instead have an oppositional reading to truly understand what is being marketed by these institutions. Overall, I think that O’Neill’s call for action was a genuine concern for the social norms that online platforms have created and the harmful effects they have in the offline world.

Parkinson, H. J. (2015, November 11). Instagram star Essena O'Neill calls out fake social media couples. Retrieved December 03, 2016

Dijck, J. V. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.