Between being affected and being an active emotion 'manager': young women's accounts of social media use and wellbeing.

Abstract

Objective: A growing body of empirical research traces the impact of social media use on young women's psychological wellbeing. The aim of the present article is to explore young female users' affective relationship with social media platforms in the context of gendered, postfeminist self-making.

Design: Drawing on dialogical self-theory, this study analyses the interplay between different voices-of-the-self in participants' accounts of social media use.

Results: Participants construct social media use as a 'double-edged sword'. Being exposed to idealised content elicits self-othering, i.e. voices-of-the-self associated with postfeminist ideals devaluing various 'deficient' aspects of the self, and thus negative affects. To counter the adverse effects of self-othering, young women consume social media content aimed at normalising and thereby affectively re-integrating 'othered' aspects of the self. They also post selfies in order to be 'seen'. Our findings suggest that being negatively affected by social media requires young women to engage in ongoing affective labour to actively restore - if only temporarily - a sense of self-worth through social media use.

Conclusion: The precariousness of the produced states of self-acceptance raises the question under what conditions social media use can have a positive impact on young women's self-understandings and thus psychological wellbeing.