Blog Post #4 - Essena O'Neill

Essena O'Neill and Van Dijck's "Neoliberal Economic Principles"

Essena O’Neill shook up the Internet recently with her story on why social media is nothing but dishonest and staged. She made claims that she, and other popular social media presences like her, are extremely depressed and have unhealthy perceptions of themselves and their appearance as a result of  acquiring more followers on various social media platforms, such as Instagram. Although I do not like Essena O’Neil and believe her claim was a little too generalized to label all social media users as the same as herself, it can be noted that much of her argument does add up to Van Dijk’s idea of “neoliberal economic principles”.

The concept of neoliberal economic principle is the thought that “connectivity derives from a continuous pressure- form both peers and technology- to expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances” (21). This is a very similar idea to what Essena was trying to explain in her exploitative rant on social media. Social media is growing rapidly in popularity and the idea of being known on social media is an idea many people find intriguing and important. In order to stand out from the millions of social media users today, one might feel as though they need to go the extra mile to be different or better than the rest. In this sense, we can see the pressure that both Van Dijck and Essena argue is taking over how people use social media.

With that being said, I believe that Essena is not entirely correct in her argument and in ways goes against Van Dijck’s model as well. People use social media for a variety of different reasons; many without care of what others are thinking when they post content. Essena’s argument is extremely general and cannot sum up the millions of people using social media on a daily basis. Social media use has a lot to do with the individual since it is a personal way of portraying whatever you’d like to a broader audience. With that being said, Essena’s argument lacks a valid argument that can be universally applied, in my opinion. This means while in her case (and in the case of many others like Essena) neoliberal economic principles do apply, while in other cases these principles do not entirely work. When it comes to social media presence, I do not believe one person can sum up the whole of the online community. There are simply too many different people who are focusing and producing too much variety of content to group them all under the same category.  Although it was a good way to bring attention to one way social media can be negative, Essena’s video lacks many qualities of a valid, believable argument that people will want to follow and many people have already forgotten about the movement she attempted to start.