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. 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. 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. 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. This research finds that social media impact conceptions of well-being in a cyclic and two-pronged manner. To conduct this research, I used narrative ethnographic methods, including person-centered interviews and audio diaries performed by participants themselves.

This thesis contends that strong resonances between the negative representations of these different technologies indicate the lack of novelty of many contemporary criticisms of new communications technologies, suggesting both the need for their highly critical evaluation, and the value of further comparative historical analyses of negative representations of communications technologies.ĭrawing 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. In response, this thesis presents a history of negative representations of the telegraph in Britain and America during the period of its predominance in the late nineteenth century. In spite of this, negative representations of the telegraph have so far received no sustained scholarly attention. For such an analysis the telegraph, as the first widespread electronic communications medium, presents itself as a valuable object of research.

In light of a widely identified turn towards a negative discourse surrounding new communications technologies, there has emerged an apparent value in comparative analyses of the negative discourses that surrounded older communications technologies. Dissertation submitted in part completion of an MSc in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester awarded a distinction grade.

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