Blog Post #4: Essena O'Neill and Jose Van Dijck

            When Australian social media influencer Essena O’Neill decided to highlight the issues of inauthenticity within social media the world took notice. Through the process of deleting more than half of her Instagram photos, changing the captions on her remaining photos to show the “real” side of social media, and creating a new website titled “Let’s Be Game Changers”, O’Neill touched on the most important issues that she believes are affecting social media users today. O’Neill’s abrupt decision to quit the social media sites that had made her famous came as a shock to many, as she had built up a fan base of hundreds of thousands of people. Jose Van Dijck’s argument that the culture of connectivity arises through the process of continuous pressure “both from peers and technologies – to expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances” highlights the issues surrounding constant social media usage (21). When Van Dijck states that “Platform tactics such as the popularity principle and ranking mechanisms… are firmly rooted in a ideology of that values hierarchy, competition and a winner take all mindset” (21), she is speaking to the process by which social media users obsess over elements such as likes and followers as they judge the overall success of their presence on social media.

I believe Essena O’Neill’s recent actions to be supportive of Van Dijck’s “neoliberal economic principles” of the culture of connectivity of contemporary social media platforms. O’Neill’s abrupt decision to deconstruct the online reality that she had built through social media came from a place of dissatisfaction. Since O’Neill fabricated a perfect reality for her followers, it was her social media presence as a whole that revolved around “the popularity principle and ranking mechanisms” that Van Dijck speaks to. In O’Neill’s YouTube video “Why I REALLY am quitting social media” she confesses that the world of social media is fake and that although she was able to build an entire career around her online presence, the perfection that is shown through the online world does not translate to real life. Van Dijck’s “neoliberal economic principles” demonstrates how the online world of social media is fabricated for the purpose of fostering competition between one another. This is done because the process of connectivity will always contain the element of popularity. There will always be someone gaining more likes than you, taking better pictures that you, and ultimately performing better than you on social media. It is for this reason that Essena O’Neill found it necessary to quit social media all together in order to gain some perspective on what really matters. The importance of recognizing the fabricated competition that is constructed through the use of social media is demonstrated by O’Neill, as she states “There is so much more we could be doing than editing ourselves and proving ourselves to others”. In the case of Essena O’Neill, I hope that she finds what she is looking for outside of her online persona, and that she lives a more authentic life. I believe that despite the fame she found through apps such as Instagram, O’Neill will have no problem forming meaningful connections with her peers outside of her social media bubble. What do you think?