'Hey! I’m back after a 24h #DigitalDetox!’: Influencers posing disconnection

This chapter looks at how influencers are reckoning with social media. By focusing on different discourses from social media posts to coverage in popu- lar media we explore these apparently contradictory gestures where influenc- ers position themselves against the very platforms that have helped them to gain attention in the first place and on which they depend. Hesselberth (2018, 2002) argues that studies on discourses of disconnectivity do not capture the gesture towards disconnectivity, which should be looked at with- out the ‘primacy of logos’. Yet we feel it is urgent to study the meanings of disconnection among visible figures inside social media as an important part of the paradox, to unpack how their discourses are articulated with other types of discourse. We analyze the content production by influencers on social media—Instagram, YouTube, blogs, podcasts—and their visibility on media serving as testimonies of those experiences. We selected influencers in the fields of fashion, beauty, lifestyle, travel, fitness, and sports, as we aimed to explore the meaning of the practice across different forms of narrativization of everyday life. In our exploratory, qualitative research, we searched for influ- encers of all tiers—from nano- and micro- to macro- and mega-influencers, according to current industry categorizations1 and influencer-ranking plat- forms, together with social media celebrities—to capture different levels of compromise with platforms. We considered influencers from English-, Italian-, and Portuguese-speaking contexts, for linguistic capacities of the authors. Our search was conducted through titles, tags, or hashtags such as ‘social media detox’, ‘quit media for x days’, ‘x days off social media’ (on the aforementioned languages) on Google, YouTube, and through hashtags on Instagram, considering the period of 2015 to 2020. Given the nature of search engines and social media, nano- or micro-influencers were more difficult to find. Our overall sample was composed of 30 influencers, mostly female. We used some of the news media on the topic to track influencers associated with these practices; in some cases, where campaigns were at place, we sought for additional influencers involved. Our corpus consisted of at least one form of social media or media content by each of the influencers—the cited pieces are included in appendix. For all the selected content, we extracted extensive transcription notes, and did an inductive analysis to identify a limited number of themes (Corbin and Strauss 2008). Our analysis develops in three parts: first, it shows how influencers portray their job as hyperconnected and at the verge of breaching; second, it looks at their practices of disconnecting—and motivations for those practices—as they are narrativized in their social media content or news media; and, last, it examines the ways in which they return to connectivity and advise the audience based on their experience.