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University of California Press

Healthy Users

The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media

by Niall Docherty (Author)
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: May 2025
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 345
ISBN: 9780520390645
Trim Size: 6 x 9

About the Book

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.
 

About the Author

Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.