Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media with Niall Docherty (U California Press, 2025)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Oct 29, 2026 · 22m

We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media (U California Press, 2025) Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance…