Time for Autonomy: Subjectivity, Sociality and Time with Social Media and its Implications for Well-Being
Date
2019-11-14
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ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Drawing on critical interpretive medical anthropology (Lock and Scheper-Hughes 1996) and Biehl et al.’s (2007) work on subjectivity, this thesis investigates the effects of social media and their entanglement in surveillance capitalism on the perceptions and embodiments of well-being in consumer culture. To conduct this research, I used narrative ethnographic methods, including person-centered interviews and audio diaries performed by participants themselves. This research finds that social media impact conceptions of well-being in a cyclic and two-pronged manner. First, social networking sites (SNSs) and apps are vigorously designed to coerce, manipulate and commodify user attention, which reifies users into those with more, or less, autonomy. Second, while social media are considered “useful tools” for manifesting sociality and managing time and resources, social media also utilize vulnerable intersubjectivities to encourage compulsive use, isolate the individual and consequently lower individual autonomy. Not only does this initiate habitual behaviours that oppose participants’ understandings of well-being, but these recursive patterns are beginning to shift definitions of well-being to justify detrimental social media use. This research contributes to a growing body of work that examines the efficacy of social media as well as the importance of autonomy for well-being in surveillance capitalism. While highlighting the dearth of research conducted on social media and well-being in medical anthropology as of yet, this study also emphasizes the importance of developing medical anthropological research on intersubjectivities of efficiency, the digitization of subjectivities in healthcare and the enactment and spread of well-being concepts at various levels of globality.
Description
Keywords
Well-being, Surveillance Capitalism, Subjectivities, Critical Medical Anthropology, Social Media
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
Archaeology and Anthropology
Program
Anthropology