Abstract
Social media influencers are becoming increasingly wide-reaching and influential, and many specialise in health and well-being, promoting products and apps that are sold as ways to improve health outcomes. Using a critical neoliberal lens, this thesis will focus on social media influencers’ promotion of a specific reproductive health app, Daysy. Daysy is advertised as a reliable and trustworthy form of safe contraception, despite its effectiveness being called into question.
Social media influencers self-brand and self-objectify as they quantify the self through tracking technology, which is often viewed as a neoliberal understanding of health. The internet has provided a space for community and connection for those concerned with health, with lay people embodying the role of expert in response to being disillusioned with medical authority. These online experts promote certain methods towards health and wellbeing, often shifting into a naturalness bias and focus on the individual through fitness and diet. Using online platforms, individuals present themselves as authentic, and develop trust with their audience over time.
Netnography was the method used to gather data, a form of online ethnography developed in 2010. I collected public data from three key social media influencers who work in Aotearoa New Zealand and promote the Daysy app. The data is richly varied, including field notes and observations collected in the form of screen shots. Data was gathered from profiles, images, text on posts, videos, vlogs and blogs. I examined the relationships and reciprocations between social media influencers, products and followers.
In my analysis, I begin by outlining this particular group of connected influencers as a networked public, highlighting the features, affordances and dynamics all present within this community. I then conduct a reflexive thematic analysis of my case study data and present four themes. The first theme addresses how social media influencers perform authenticity for their audience through displaying the highlights and lowlights of their lives publicly, while also commodifying those experiences. The second theme examines how social media influencers within this networked public express themselves as self-made experts on a variety of topics, including reproductive health, presenting neoliberal citizenship and consumerism as desirable. The third theme covers how these influencers emphasise achieving a docile body through the use of tracking technology and the human to non-human interactions afforded by this technology. The fourth theme addresses how technology becomes imbued with naturalness, and becomes an augment of the human body, a tool for translation between the mind and the body.
Overall, influencers within this networked public promote the consumption and use of reproductive health apps as a form of liberation and freedom from hormonal contraception. Influencers use their platform to display ideal neoliberal citizenship by both actively participating in and promoting neoliberal capitalist ideology. Participation in neoliberal consumption, alongside the rejection of medical and scientific authority, is framed as a revolutionary liberation from oppression. Despite using language suggesting collective action and protest, the method of protest is centred solely on individual purchasing and self-control.