Blog Post 4: “The Girl Who 'Quit' Social Media"

Essena O’Neill's recent decision to quit Instagram has attracted a great deal of attention. O’Neill renounces social media, as she claims that she was miserable, but the more followers, likes, praise, and views that she received online helped her to feel better about herself. She realized that she shouldn’t have to feel that way, and decided that the root of the problem was Instagram. She created a video with the hope of bringing attention to the issues created by social media, where she details her change of heart with respect to social media, along with the lengths she would go just to get the perfect photograph for Instagram.

In her “Why I REALLY am quitting social media” YouTube video, O’Neill admits: “I had the ‘dream life.’ To a lot of people I ‘made it’…I was surrounded by all this wealth, power, and fame, and yet I had never been so miserable”.

The quote above illustrates Van Dijck’s notion of neoliberal economic principles, in the ways by which O’Neill’s goal was to “expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances” (Van Dijck 21). With that said, it is clear that O’Neill's recent actions are supportive of what Van Dijck calls the “neoliberal economic principles” of the culture of connectivity of contemporary social media platforms. Specifically, O’Neill's sudden renunciation of Instagram emphasizes the unauthentic side of social media, of which users can use to their own advantage, in the efforts of achieving fame and influence. In light of this, O’Neill decided to take on a more radical approach to her social media past by editing the captions of her Instagram photos by providing more honest descriptions in terms of what it took to achieve each photo. She wanted people to understand that for her, posting a photograph wasn’t as easy as 1, 2, 3, as there was a lot more involved with regard to the pressures of maintaining her contrived image.