Facebook’s Ideal User: Healthy Habits, Social Capital, and the Politics of Well-Being Online

Abstract

Through an analysis of Facebook design blogs, funded social psychology and human–computer interaction (HCI) research, this article will demonstrate how Facebook “scripts” a discursive material configuration of ideal use. It will show how users are prompted toward habits of “healthy” active usership—commenting on posts, direct messaging, and liking, for instance, through the design of the News Feed’s user interface. This article will detail how Facebook users are technologically nudged to choose practices of active behavior on the News Feed for the sake of their own health. This socio-technical configuration brings together contingent evolutionary psychology and neoliberal theories of social capital to construct a model of eudaimonic well-being—normative descriptions of what it means to live well as a human in time. In this way, Facebook will be shown to conceptualize well-being as an outcome of user choice, raising pertinent links to modalities of neoliberal responsibilization as a result. The conclusion will argue that Facebook’s configuration of its ideal user ought to be situated within a historical lineage of governance through habit, and will critically assess the extent to which the discursive and material scripting of the News Feed, which seeks to channel user behavior along “healthy,” predictable, and profitable avenues of interaction, operates as a technology of power entwined with contemporary relations of digital capitalism.