‘It was too much technology … I chucked my laptop across the room': young women, networked affect and the positivity imperative

ABSTRACT

Engaging with theories of networked affect, this paper highlights the importance of new ways of thinking about young women’s relations with social media beyond ‘good or bad’ narratives, and towards more affective, embodied and agentic relations with digital technologies. Drawing upon interviews with 45 young women (16–25 years), we reveal the emergence of new digital intensities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the reshaping of young women’s digital encounters. As well as highlighting the importance of digital technologies for escaping the stressors of pandemic life, digital practices surfaced creativity, connection and moments of joy. Yet for many young women, the ‘positivity imperative’ to perform proactive and productive feminine subjectivities during the pandemic re-turned their digital relations, surfacing negative affects (i.e. guilt, anger, shame) about themselves and their bodies. There was a networked affective ‘stickiness’ of these feelings, prompting some to navigate new boundaries around their social media engagement to protect their own wellbeing. In so doing, we see how the pandemic acted as a ‘jolt or spark’, activating new affective entanglements with digital technologies, and evoking new ethical and affective relations of care with bodies and subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• digital technologies
• young women
• networked affect

Introduction

Research, policy and public commentary are increasingly focused on the mental health effects of social media on young people, and particularly young women. With the emphasis on body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, cyberbullying, online abuse, addiction, anxiety and depression, digital media are often cast as detrimental in the everyday lives of youth (Goodyear and Armour 2019; Social Media 2023). Yet our research with young women reveals a more nuanced picture. Drawing upon ‘networked affect’, this article highlights the importance of thinking about young women’s relations with social media beyond ‘good or bad’ narratives, and towards more relational, affective and embodied relations with digital technologies.

Based on interviews and focus groups with 45 young women (16–25 years) living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we explore the affective intensities of young women’s everyday digital lives and consider how these shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic. As digital technology use increased and was reoriented for schooling, entertainment, connection and escapism, new affective relations with digital devices surfaced, characterized by joy, pleasure and creativity, as well as guilt, anger, and body image concerns. The ‘positivity imperative’ (Gill and Orgad 2022) to remain productive, optimistic and resilient during the pandemic, as well as expectations to perform such pandemic positivity on social media and in digital communications, was often described as ‘too much’ for young women. While the constraints of this positivity imperative were viscerally experienced, participants described how they navigated these complexities through the intensified networked affect that emerged during pandemic times and actively created new boundaries and relationships between bodies, technologies, social discourses and subjectivities.

Literature review: social media, young women, and the pandemic

Young women’s engagement with social media has drawn considerable academic attention, with a particular focus on the effects of social media (and especially appearance-focused social media) on mental health and body image dissatisfaction (Prichard et al. 2020). While much has been made of the risks of young women’s digital media use, less attention has been paid to their capacities to actively and thoughtfully negotiate, and respond to, health and digital media. Building upon a growing body of feminist scholarship examining young people’s interactions with digital technologies as entangled in many aspects of their everyday lives (i.e. schooling, friendships, activisms) (Fullagar, Rich, and Francombe-Webb 2017; Hendry 2020), and women’s ethical, embodied, agentic and relational engagements with digital technologies and social media (Hockin-Boyers, Pope, and Jamie 2021; Toffoletti et al. 2023), scholars are drawing upon theories of affect and embodiment to examine girls and young women’s active negotiations of gendered risk and opportunity, and mental health and wellbeing, in social media spaces (Hendry 2020; Ringrose and Renold 2014; Toll and Norman 2021). In so doing, this research reveals the varied ways young women from diverse social, cultural and gender positionings are embodying and performing rage, shame, guilt and desire in their affective, relational, ethical and political engagements with their own and other bodies.

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, where this study was conducted, very little research has focused explicitly on young women’s engagement with social media. Important exceptions include Hutton and colleagues (2016) research on young women navigating femininity and drinking culture on Facebook; Sills and colleagues (2016) study of young critics (including young women) of the proliferation of rape culture in online spaces; and Schuster’s (2013) examination of young women’s use of social media for political participation and activism. While concerns over the negative impact of digital media on young people’s wellbeing have been robustly expressed both internationally (Social Media 2023) and in New Zealand (Insights 2017), nuanced and theoretically informed consideration of how these media may provide everyday support and care are lacking. Recognizing a need for more contemporary and generous theorizations of young people’s everyday digital media practices (Byron 2020), our research examines young women’s engagement with digital technologies and social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Youth and social media in pandemic times

Since the emergence of COVID-19, researchers have examined the impact of the pandemic on young people’s health and wellbeing, emotions, loneliness, social connection, educational outcomes and precarity (MacDonald et al. 2023; Scott et al. 2023). Researchers and health professionals have documented the rise in mental health issues experienced by young people, and particularly young women during the pandemic (Mendolia, Suziedelyte, and Zhu 2022). Many young women (particularly those of socially, ethnically and economically marginalized families and communities) were also expected to carry additional responsibilities in the home (i.e. caring for younger siblings or vulnerable family members), while navigating school, work and social commitments (Thorpe et al., 2023a; Ncube et al. 2022). However, young women were not simply victims to the pandemic but were highly responsive in their efforts to not only survive but also thrive, accessing and leveraging ‘social, familial, aspirational, resistant, and navigational capital … to persist beyond pandemic times’ (Turner and Castle 2023). Their engagement with social media and digital technologies was shaped by these everyday challenges, as well as their capacities to respond creatively to the rapidly changing world around them.

Through COVID-19, the roles of digital technologies and social media in young people’s everyday lives (schooling, friendships, entertainment) shifted and were significantly intensified (Hamilton, Nesi, and Choukas-Bradley 2022). A growing body of research has examined the ways social media usage during the pandemic exacerbated mental health issues among youth, with a particular focus on the rise of social media ‘exhaustion’, ‘disorders’, ‘addictions’ and ‘cyberbullying’ (Bailey et al. 2022). Research has shown that adolescents and young people who spent more time on social media were more likely to experience COVID-19-related stress, loneliness and depression (Marciano et al. 2021).

In their research on youths’ use of social media as a ‘coping mechanism’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, Maftei and colleagues (2022) identified gender differences in social media use, and a ‘tendency for teenage girls to show maladaptive affective reactions related to social media use at a significantly higher level than male teenagers’ (n.p). Others have focused specifically on the exacerbated negative effects of social media on young women’s mental health and body dissatisfaction during the pandemic (Choukas-Bradley et al. 2022). For example, Cataldo and colleagues (2022) conducted an international (five countries) investigation on social media engagement during the pandemic, to reveal a strong association between ‘fitspiration media and body image anxiety’ among women. Researchers have yet to examine the social media practices and experiences of young women living in New Zealand during the pandemic.

While much of the research on young women, social media and digital technologies during pandemic times has focused on risk, vulnerabilities, and negative affect (i.e. body dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression), in this paper we move ‘beyond media panics’ (Buckingham and Strandgaard Jensen 2012), and instead reorient attention to how young women are making meaning of, embodying, responding to these digital intensities. This paper considers the affective intensities of young women’s pandemic lives as they were using digital technologies for educational purposes, connection with friends and family, entertainment, and escapism. In so doing, we build upon and extend recent writing on youth, social media and affect, through an engagement with ‘networked affect’ and an understanding of the affective intensities surfaced through pandemic life.

Theoretical framework: networked affect in the pandemic atmosphere

The pandemic surfaced a unique affective atmosphere, with fear, hope, despair, sadness, frustration and grief circulating in and through bodies (Lupton 2022). Scholars have noted the shifting relations between bodies, space and digital devices wrought by the pandemic and the specific affective atmospheres that characterized the intensity and uncertainty of this time (Clark & Lupton 2021; Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). Some are drawing upon theories of affect to examine how the pandemic has shifted human and more-than-human affective relations with technologies. For example, Hardley and Richardson (2021) examine ‘embodied mobile media practices’ to reveal the ‘rapid increase in both screen time and time spent at home’ as radically altering our experience of ‘networked corporeality’ (625).

While pandemic-focused research on the reorienting of digital technologies, bodies and affect are guided by diverse conceptual strands, they build upon a strong foundation of research focused on the ‘affective fabrics of digital cultures’ (Kuntsman 2012, 3). In acknowledging the feelings and affects that ‘reverberate in and out of cyberspace’ (1), Kuntsman underlines the need to ‘follow the circulation of texts and feelings’ (2) when studying digital cultures and practices. In our examination of young women’s digital media practices during the COVID-19 pandemic we build upon recent theorizing of affect, digital technologies, and social media, drawing specifically upon the concept of networked affect.

Networked affect has been defined as the ‘circulation and oscillation of intensity in the framework of online communication that involves a plethora of actors’ including ‘individual users, more or less emergent collective bodies, human and non-human and thus also devices, platforms, applications, interfaces, companies, files and threads’ (Paasonen 2018, 283). Networked affect then extends beyond human-centric notions of individual feelings and instead emphasizes the affective flows and relations emerging through human engagements with digital media and devices. Thinking with this concept allows us to imagine affect as an active process of ‘being networked’, and repositions it ‘as always already in-between different bodies’, emerging in ‘encounters between them’, shaping and animating the multiple agents involved (Paasonen 2018, 284). In this paper, we engage this theoretical concept to examine young women’s engagement with social media and digital technologies in the distinctive affective atmosphere of the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagining young women’s digital practices as embodied, affective and relational, and acknowledging how dramatically they shifted during the pandemic, we seek to expand understanding of young women’s digital practices towards affective networks, encompassing the ‘connections and disconnections’ between bodies and technologies, with digital encounters engaging and activating young women’s embodied subjectivities in multiple ways (Paasonen 2018, 283).

Young women and the positivity imperative

The pandemic surfaced a distinct affective atmosphere, impacting young women’s health and wellbeing in a range of ways, which brought relationships with digital technologies to the fore in new ways. In this paper we identify the ‘positivity imperative’– expectations to be resilient, proactive and to maintain and perform a positive outlook – as integral to the pandemic atmosphere that significantly shaped young women’s affective respondings and digital relations during this period.

Gill and Orgad (2022) describe the pervasiveness of positivity imperatives directed at women during the pandemic, operating ‘not only through verbal advice’ but also through ‘an emphasis on developing new social practices’ such as exercise, nutrition, sleep and self-care. Examining Australian women’s magazines, James and Sawyer (2023) also identified repeated messaging to women to ‘stay positive and develop wellbeing routines to help them flourish’ (1). While such messaging may be well-meaning, it ‘puts more pressure on women in times of upheaval’, and ‘reinforces normative neoliberal subjectivity with its roots in therapeutic culture and the happiness industry’ (James and Sawyer 2023, 1). The positivity imperative was entangled with discourses of the ‘good’ pandemic feminine subject ‘who would, and could, follow the directive to “stay at home” in order not only to care for themselves and others, but to use the “opportunity” of lockdown to transform and improve the self' (Wood 2024, 1).

The pandemic positivity imperative was reoriented for youth with a focus on resilience and productivity (i.e. keeping up with schoolwork, engaging in exercise and self-care). In their research with Canadian youth, Van de Velde and colleagues (2023) found that youth loneliness was ‘accentuated by a powerful social norm of positivity conveyed by both social networks and the media’ (41). Young people were expected to ‘make the best’ of this time by ‘staying active, making new resolutions and throwing themselves into projects, and in so doing, transform this period of forced aloneness into a proactive movement towards greater well-being’ (41). Importantly, this imperative to take personal responsibility surfaced negative affect (i.e. failure, loneliness) among some young adults who were unable to bring about this mental shift, instead keenly aware of the gap between their own situation and the illusion of others’ success, ‘forcing them into a cruel self-reflection’ when they were unable to live up to the ‘illusion of others’ success’ (41). As we explain in this paper, young women’s affective, embodied and relational engagements with social media were significantly shaped by this pandemic positivity imperative.

Methods

With ethical approval from the University of Waikato, we conducted interviews and focus groups with a total of 45 young women aged 16–25 years during the second half of 2022. Requirements of participation were that they self-identify as a woman, came within the age range (16–25), and were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the pandemic. With the multicultural research team reaching out to young women in their social, work and familial networks, the sample was intentionally diverse, including those identifying as mixed ethnicity (i.e. Māori-Samoan, Samoan-Chinese, Fijian-Indian) (13), Pākeha/NZ European (12), Māori (11), African heritage (4), Asian heritage (3), or with lineage to specific Pacific nations (i.e. Samoan, Tongan) (2). Many (not all) of the participants were students either in high school (32) or tertiary education (11), with many also working part- or full-time (i.e. supermarket, sport and fitness trainers, community work, hospitality). Pseudonyms are used for all participants, except those who explicitly stated a desire to use their first name. As an acknowledgment of their time, all participants were given a gift voucher of their choosing (i.e. supermarket, book, clothing).

We offered the young women the option of participating in either an interview or focus group with other young women known to them (either via school, sports group, or existing friendships), resulting in 7 focus groups and 7 interviews. While most of the interviews and focus groups took place in person in spaces of convenience to the young women (i.e. private rooms at schools, cafes), some occurred digitally using Zoom. Interviews and focus groups ranged from 50 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on participant availability), and were digitally recorded then professionally transcribed. We recognized each interview and focus group as a ‘situated affective encounter’ with bodies, affect and devices all part of the research assemblage (Ayata et al. 2019). Indeed, phones were lively and agentic, occasionally beeping, vibrating or lighting up, reminding us of their entangled presence in our everyday lives (Lupton 2019). In each encounter, we practiced a feminist ethic of care, attuning and attending to the emotional and affective capacities of the young women, always working to create a comfortable, safe and respectful space.

We used the same interview guide for both interviews and focus groups, which included 22 questions organized into five sections: (1) health and wellbeing, (2) roles and responsibilities, (3) physical practices, (4) digital engagements, and (5) social connections. The fourth section focused on the role of digital technologies in their lives, though many of the young women also spoke to this topic in other parts of the interviews, highlighting the entangled dimensions of their digital practices. The focus groups ranged from two to ten participants, and because the young women knew each other, there were often rich discussions between participants, thus requiring greater flexibility in how the interview guide was used. The individual interviews offered more personalized information, and greater depth at times. Wherever possible, we worked to ensure consistency in the questions and prompts for interviews and focus groups. Adopting a semi-structured approach, we sought to create an environment where the young women felt comfortable responding to questions, and could (re)direct the conversation such that they could speak to topics of importance to them.

The analysis presented herein draws upon comments made throughout the interviews and focus groups specific to the role of digital technologies in their everyday practices, and contextualized within their pandemic lives. In this paper we engaged in reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clark 2021), initially analysing transcripts individually, then collectively, before re-reading the data through theory. In later stages, we brought the transcripts into dialogue with literature on young women and social media, and particularly feminist writings on networked affect. In so doing, we attuned to words and phrases that ‘glowed’ with affective intensity, piquing our curiosity, such that we re-turned (rotating and revisiting over and over) the empirical material with theory and through the visceral and embodied process of writing (MacLure 2013). Elsewhere we have applied a feminist intersectional lens to examine young women’s everyday experiences (at home, school, work) during the pandemic (Thorpe et al, 2023a), and their engagement in sport and physical activity (Thorpe et al, 2023b). Herein, we focus specifically on their affective relations with digital technologies, and while our sample is highly diverse, we avoid making comparisons based on socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural positionings of participants because this was not clearly evidenced in the data. Rather, adopting a networked affect approach, we explore the multiplicities in young women’s engagement with digital technologies and social media as deeply affective, visceral, and entangled in many aspects of their lives (i.e. schooling, friendships, domestic life).

Findings and discussion

Through our multi-phased process of analysis, we identified three key interrelated themes that reveal how the pandemic impacted young women’s affective relations with digital technologies: (i) New digital assemblages and affective intensities of escapism, connection, and creativity, (ii) Negative networked affect (guilt, anger, negative self-thoughts, and body image) in the context of the ‘pandemic positivity’ imperative, and (iii) New ethics of care and active navigation of boundaries between bodies, technologies and affect.

The pandemic and networked affect: escapism, connection and creativity

Like many of their generation, the young women in our study were ‘deeply immersed in screens and digital technologies, social media and other forms of digital culture’ prior to the emergence of COVID-19 (Petit 2015, 169). Yet all spoke of the pandemic as radically altering their engagement with social media and digital technologies. Many described the surfacing of new affective intensities as they spent many more hours on their devices (phones, computers, tablets) for educational, connection and entertainment purposes. While the sheer number of hours of digital device use increased, the affective quality of this time was anything but constant. Technologies shifted from being a source of ‘solace [and] entertainment’, to being implicated in the increased expectations to be productive (i.e. schoolwork). Digital devices were suddenly central and necessary for at-home learning, prompting new rules and feelings around technology use. As one participant said,

[I] used to find solace in my phone, just being the entertainment. But now it’s got all those Google classroom notifications and all those emails on your phone. It’s a constant reminder that I have to do things, which is good because I need to do those things, but it’s really hard to disconnect [and] find that divide between them too. (Riley, 18, Pākehā)

Alongside the intensified digital demands of school, the young women described heightened caring roles and domestic responsibilities during the pandemic, including minding younger siblings, taking care of elderly and disabled family members, additional housework and shopping for families. In our previous research, we explain that it was particularly Māori, Pacific and ethnic minority young women who carried heightened domestic roles and responsibilities to support their families during a time of job losses, precarity, health inequities and vulnerabilities, and/or with parents in frontline employment (Thorpe et al, 2023a). In this context, the young women had varying levels of leisure time available, but all described spending more of their free time on social media experimenting with new and existing digital platforms in new ways. For example, many turned to TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram as forms of entertainment and escapism from the stressors of pandemic life:

I was just watching TikTok [and] Netflix; watching movies and podcasts just made life go a little bit faster. It also took away what was happening from the outside because you were just so zoned in on social media and what’s going on there that you forget about what’s going on. (Kate, 20, Pākehā)

I just used to go on YouTube … and also Snapchat as well … because I was always so bored. I just wanted to not be bored. (Alannah, 16, Indian)

I use TikTok as a mind-numbing thing. I know it's a screen so it's bad, but it’s just a way to shut down your mind for a few minutes. Look at random crap. (Sandy, 21, Māori)

Scholars have identified the intense desire to escape pandemic conditions and the way fleeting feelings of escape were afforded through technologies, physical activity, and creative uses of indoor and outdoor space (Clark & Lupton 2021). The young women also described desires to escape or avoid the ‘hard stuff’, including stressors and worries of pandemic life, additional responsibilities, and the crushing boredom wrought by lock-down conditions. These findings resonate with Petit’s (2015) writing on ‘digital disaffect’, which ‘helps to name how boredom or underwhelming feelings coexist with the affective jolts the internet seemingly offers’ (McBean 2015, p. 133). For the young women in our study, the ‘affective jolts’ from social media and digital technologies were particularly powerful during the pandemic where boredom and loneliness were defining and prominent feelings.

Young women engaged digital technologies to escape the stressors of home, school, and pandemic life, to make time pass, and to ‘feel’ something amidst a pandemic atmosphere of social isolation and boredom. They did so in a context where dominant discourses of social media as ‘bad’ (i.e. unproductive, distraction, addictive, bad for body image) were both internalized and negotiated:

It was just watching other people. I think I find comfort in it, and it’s just so mindless. It’s actually really bad. It’s terrible. (Sofia, 18, Māori)

TiKTok was one of the main ones because it was just so easy to scroll … It's a bit dangerous, because it lowers your attention span. But the videos are so short, it’s a quick fix for entertainment. (Huda, 19, Sri Lankan)

In such comments, we see the circulation of multiple and contradictory affects, positive and negative feelings (i.e. comfort, bad, terrible) entangle with discourses of productivity and positivity, and pervasive understandings of social media as being ‘bad’ or 'dangerous' for their mental health and wellbeing.

The young women actively negotiated these tensions and also revealed how the use of digital technologies afforded practices of care and connection with their friends. For example, Huda (19, Sri Lankan) recalled video calling two of her friends ‘every day [for] hours on end’, bringing them ‘so much closer’. Similarly, Princess (21, Tongan) describes her best friend regularly checking on her during a difficult time, asking ‘Are you okay?’ which she acknowledges was important for ‘getting me back on track … we were motivating each other’. Such comments highlight the emergence of new digital practices of care through connection and co-presence performed through the networked affects of the pandemic (Byron 2020). Importantly, young women were navigating these positive aspects of social media in a context where the risks of social media for youth were the dominant narrative proliferating through the media, their schools, and parents.

These findings also highlight the agentic capacities of young people through their digital practices. We found young women to be highly creative in accessing and using digital technologies to facilitate such connections (Thompson et al. 2020). For example, Zahi (16, Somali) did not have a phone during the first lockdown, ‘the only way I could stay connected with my mates was on my computer, so I downloaded Instagram onto that. Desperate times call for desperate measures’. Despite not having a phone, Zahi was creative in her usage of other digital technologies to remain connected with her friends who provided much support during this challenging time.

Some young women were inspired to produce their own social media videos (i.e. dancing, gym, and skateboarding TikTok videos) as a means of creativity and fun interactions with their peers:

Actually, I did make a couple of TikToks, just of me doing gym workouts. I normally wouldn’t do that but it was just something different, I was bored, it made the time go by faster, it distracted me. (Kate, 20, Pākehā)

I think we were just bored so we just skated somewhere and started filming. (Ana, 17, Māori-Samoan)

While loneliness and boredom are typically conceived as negative affects, here we see them as ‘doing’ something, prompting some young women to be more playful in the digital relations with their own and others’ moving bodies. Engaging a networked affect approach, and recognizing the distinctive pandemic atmosphere of fear, anxiety and boredom, we are moved beyond binaried narratives of social media as good or bad for young women. Instead, we show how the circulation of networked affect activates young women’s bodies in a range of settings (i.e. garage doing a workout, streets around one’s neighbourhood).

Mirroring international trends, the young women in our study were particularly drawn to the creative, fun and entertaining capacities of TikTok (Burchell 2023). Scholars have examined the popularity of TikTok among young women during the pandemic, transforming teenage girls’ ‘bedroom culture’ from private to public space (Kennedy 2020). While some of the young women ‘loved’ doing the TikTok dances, few posted their own dance videos. Instead, they tended to post videos of outdoor physical activities (skateboarding, gym workouts in the garage). Some expressed concerns about ‘girls doing dances without many clothes on’ (Ana, 17, Māori-Samoan). Continuing, Ana described her affective response to the trend of young women dancing in their bedrooms on TikTok: ‘Seeing them do that was really eww, really uncomfortable … I went into straight aunty mode’. As Kennedy (2020) notes, the celebration of particular young feminine subjects (notably white, heteronormative) on the platform during the early stages of the pandemic obscured ‘the dangers and impacts faced by girls around the world who are situated outside of the[se] ideals’ (1071). For some young women in our study, particularly those of culturally diverse backgrounds, such gendered TikTok performances were in tension with ethnic and religious values of modesty, and did not align with their pandemic experiences. Interestingly, however, in Ana’s comments we see how quickly the affective response of disgust (‘eww’) transformed into care, concern and responsibility (‘aunty mode’) for other girls and young women navigating digital platforms during the pandemic (McLean, Southerton, and Lupton 2023). The key point here is that the networked affects circulating during the pandemic were not felt in the same ways by all young women, with gender, ethnicity and culture entangled in the affective flows and relations in-between different bodies and encounters with digital technologies and social media.

The pandemic positivity imperative and negative affect: anger, guilt and body image

The positivity imperative articulated by Gill and Orgad (2022) and others was embodied, navigated, and contested by the young women in our study. To be a ‘successful’ young woman during the pandemic, they were expected to expertly manage their time, keep up with schoolwork, deal with complex emotions quietly, carry additional responsibilities within their families, and engage in self-care practices and body work. The young women described these pressures and expectations as all-pervasive, coming from schools, families, the media, and social media. In response, some turned to online sources to support their motivation to pursue such ‘positivity imperatives’:

I got into my motivation YouTube videos where I would watch these influencers get up and do motivating things like ‘clean my room with me’, ‘come study with me’, ‘spend a productive day in my life’. I was hooked because I could watch these other people being productive and that helped motivate me. But sometimes, I spent more time watching these videos than being productive (Tayla, 17, Pākehā)

A recent study by Calder-Dawe and colleagues (2024) exploring the affective practices of eight women (21-35 years) influencers living in New Zealand revealed the work of ‘relentless positivity’ as integral to their Instagram practices, with ‘optimism and resilience’ modelled in ‘emotion-laden styles and standpoints’ (1). As some of our participants reveal, consuming the affect-laden positivity posts of young women influencers was a welcome form of distraction and escapism during lockdown periods, but at times came into conflict with their own practices of productivity.

Reflecting international research findings on adult populations, many of our participants described how their social media engagement inspired and supported their physical activity practices during lockdowns. In so doing, they utilized a range of (mostly free) online resources from different platforms (i.e. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, fitness apps):

I was on Gym TikTok at one point so I was continuously getting new gym ideas which was exciting and then I’d go out into the garage and try them with the weights. (Kate, 20, Pākehā)

For me, I was at the gym five days a week [before the pandemic], but then when the lockdowns started, I found some fitness app that totally helped me. Even if I had no dumbbells … at least I still had my phone to use that app for me to still be active in a way. (Aroha, 16, Māori-Cook Island)

For many young women, free online workouts offered a valuable alternative to their pre-pandemic fitness practices, prompting feelings of fun, enjoyment, and escapism (Thorpe et al, 2023b). This proactive body work aligned with the ‘positivity imperative’, and thus evoked ‘good’ feelings (i.e. pride, achievement, control) for those willing and able to perform these feminine pandemic subjectivities.

For the majority of young women in our study, however, their engagement with social media for the purposes of escapism and entertainment increasingly conflicted with positivity imperatives and resiliency discourses, surfacing tensions and ‘bad’ feelings of guilt:

It makes me feel guilty … I don’t need to watch any of those videos. I gained nothing from them, yet I liked watching all the time. Sure it’s relaxing, but not when I should be doing my mahi [work]. It’s so bad. (Lena, 18, Māori)

With their digital devices now connected with feelings of productivity (i.e. doing schoolwork or exercise), as well as escapism and connection (relaxation, enjoyment, fun), the pandemic prompted new and conflicting feelings among young women (pleasure and guilt). These new digital relations evoked networked ‘affective stickiness’ (Ahmed 2004; Paasonen 2018, p. 285), with the affective relations of desire, comfort, desperation, guilt, and despair circulating in and through technologies and bodies.

In pandemic affective networks, digital ‘looking’ (Coleman 2008) at others was further complicated by the everyday performativities of positive affect and productivity (Van de Velde, Boudreault, and Berniard 2023). Many of the young women described how their increased engagement with appearance-focused social media surfaced negative feelings about their own bodies. While extensive literature has already documented how social media can promote body image concerns and dissatisfaction among young women, our research reveals the ways ‘ugly feelings’ (Coffey 2020) about their bodies were entangled with digital technologies and the conditions of the pandemic, including isolation, increased anxiety, sleep disruptions, changes to nutrition and exercise routines, and the pervasive ‘positivity imperative’ to perform proactive optimism and control (over the body and mind):

You're at home … eating all the time … putting on weight … feeling gross about yourself. You've got so much spare time that you're scrolling through social media and seeing stupid instabodies. So it definitely puts on a bit of a ‘ooh, you kind of suck don't ya’ [while] sitting there eating your second bag of chips for the day. Thoughts popped up like ‘God, you're a bit of a slob, aren't ya?’ (Sandy, 21, Māori)

There is a ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed 2004) of such networked affects, with ‘stupid instabodies’ keeping young women up at night, with negative thoughts (‘what am I doing eating?’ ‘you’re a bit of a slob’, ‘you kind of suck’) circulating and impacting their relationships with their bodies during and beyond the pandemic.

Importantly, comments from some young women (particularly those of culturally diverse backgrounds) draw our attention to the racialized and gendered dimensions of the social media content young women engaged with (often for many hours) during the pandemic, exacerbating the affective impact of continuously being bombarded by images of thin, toned, pro-active, productive young women on social media. The following focus group dialogue is revealing here:

Especially when Covid first started, there were a lot of skinny white girls getting TikTok fans and stuff. Everyone wanted to be like them, everyone started getting insecurities and stuff (Samsam, 16, Somali). Yeah, the platforms that I was using at the time, those Somali girls weren’t really thinking like that at the time … we were just talking about fun things. But those thoughts about body image would come to me before bed and I would just be lying there, and everything would just come all at once. (Zahi, 16, Somali)

As Kennedy (2020) highlights, during the early stages of the pandemic, TikTok was dominated by ‘white, slim, normatively attractive feminine girl stars’, with algorithms and metrics working to ‘make invisible those subjects judged not to fit the ideals of young white femininity’ (1072). As the comments from Zahi (Black Muslim who wears a hijab) allude, the (in)visibilities in social media imagery ‘stick’ to bodies differently, shaping young women’s feelings and imaginings of what bodies can do (Ahmed 2004), and affecting their everyday negotiations and embodied interactions with digital platforms. Networked affect in the pandemic atmosphere of the positivity imperative did not affect all young women in the same ways, and the visibilities of young, thin, White women on social media surfaced tensions and feelings of discomfort, frustration and dissatisfaction among some young women who did not see themselves in such representations.

In the context of a pandemic, where people were getting sick and dying, and the rules and messaging about health and what bodies could(n’t) and should(n’t) do where shifting dramatically, many of the young women continued to feel body image and beauty ideals, highlighting the potency of such digitally-mediated images and ideas. Importantly, negative networked affect was created not only through body image concerns in relation to appearance-focused social media, but also within the parameters set out by the ‘positivity imperative’ where young women internalized, embodied and resisted a new set of pressures and expectations to be resilient, proactive and productive through this period of great uncertainty, stress and disruption. A networked affect approach thus highlights the limitations of binaried narratives of social media as good or bad for young women, instead drawing our attention to the complex ways that affects (negative and positive) circulate and resonate through screens and embodied subjectivities.

Navigating networked affect: agency and ethics of care

Much of the recent literature and public commentary on young women and social media fails to recognize their agency in navigating networked affect. Within the current media-related ‘moral panic’, there is often an underlying assumption that young women will consume social media and digital technologies excessively and un-discerningly and that they lack the regulation ability or ‘good sense’ to self-govern. In contrast, our research found that through the networked intensities emerging through pandemic conditions, young women were highly aware of their complex relationships with digital technologies and actively navigated boundaries around their digital engagement.

While some scholars have focused on the potential of networked affect to harness political agency and ‘stir social action’ (Hillis, Paasonen, and Petit 2015, 3), others have considered the power of networked affect to ‘move us in novel and salient ways’ (Pedwell 2017, 158). As Pedwell (2017) writes, affect can function as ‘a jolt or spark that might move us (at least temporarily)’ (162). In this final section, we reveal the ways networked affect (anger, frustration, guilt, ‘ugly feelings’) during the pandemic functioned as a ‘jolt or a spark’, prompting many young women to think, feel, see and act differently in their relations with digital technologies, renegotiating digital habits and everyday networked relations.

The intensified relations with digital technologies, and the pressures and expectations to successfully manage schooling, family responsibilities, friendships, and self-care, moved some young women through frustration and anger. For example, Alannah (16, Indian) recalled a particularly affective digital encounter:

I got really annoyed [because] I always had to be on my laptop and it stressed me out having to do everything online. Sometimes I got really mad and I just chucked my laptop across the room and went, ‘oh my God!’ It was frustrating because you couldn’t really do anything else … You had to wake up the normal time, join zoom calls, and it was just too much technology, too much!

Such comments offer a powerful reminder that the device itself matters, not only because it affords access to the platform on which young people do homework and/or connect with friends, but because it is a specific ‘thing’ that has a physical and material and affective presence. The visceral feelings and urges surfaced through pandemic digital intensities are both affective and explicitly felt in and through the body.

Whereas some young women were moved to action through anger and frustration (e.g. throwing a laptop across the room), others were activated through the digital intensification of other negative affects and navigated new relations with technologies that felt less harmful and more sustainable. For example, some young women described actively logging-off social media, and unfollowing particular accounts, to create boundaries around their social media engagement:

I ended up deleting my Instagram account during lockdown because I didn’t enjoy looking at everybody being so productive when I was sometimes not as productive as them, and it made me feel so bad. (Alannah)

Disconnecting is a well-known exiting technique taking many forms, ‘a break, a manifesto, an act, a form of resistance, a failure’ (Karppi 2018). In particular, feminist scholars have highlighted women’s agency in curating their own social media feeds to minimize harm to their body image (Hockin-Boyers, Pope, and Jamie 2021; Toffoletti et al. 2023). Our research builds upon and extends previous scholarship, revealing the ways young women were also ‘pruning’ their digital engagements to limit the effects of the positivity imperative (‘I didn’t enjoy looking at everybody being so productive’).

As well as logging off particular accounts, some young women described how the intensities of networked affect prompted them to limit their use of social media for communicating with friends and family. By switching off their devices or logging out of social media platforms, they were actively protecting their own mental health and wellbeing, and energy levels during a time of emotional upheaval:

It was exhausting having to talk to people through lockdown. I can’t be bothered messaging. I pulled back from a lot of people [because] I couldn’t put energy into it. (Angel, 18, Māori)

For some of the young women in our study, the expectation to constantly perform positivity and productivity in their digital interactions with friends prompted efforts to minimize social media engagements with their peers:

Communicating with your friends just kind of stopped during lockdown. No one’s doing anything interesting. No one’s traveling. There’s nothing to update each other on, there’s nothing happening in your life to be like, ‘oh, so how’s it going?’ So, we kind of lost contact a bit over those months, we were just in our own bubbles, in our own worlds. (Sofia, 18, Māori)

Especially keeping connections with friends and stuff, that was hard to maintain because what are you supposed to chat about, ‘hey, what are you doing today? Nothing’. (Kate, 20, Pākehā)

Similar to participants in Van de Velde and colleagues’ (2023) study on youth loneliness, some of the young women in our research took a voluntary break from social media to ‘avoid having to respond to constant questions of “What’s up? What’s up?” and admit that nothing new was happening for [them]' (41). For some of the young women in our study, the effort required to perform everyday ‘positivity’ and productivity in their digital interactions triggered negative affects when unable or unwilling to engage in performativities of optimism and resilience. Responding to such feelings, some young women opted to disconnect or limit the frequency of their digital encounters to reserve emotional capacity, even if it meant exacerbating feelings of loneliness.

By re-organizing their engagement with technologies, young women were engaging in acts of self-care amidst the networked affect of pandemic life. In this way, our findings align with recent research on women using social media with a feminist ethic of care, recognizing their own and others’ vulnerabilities, and engaging in small acts to minimize harm to themselves and other women (Toffoletti et al. 2023). Our participants’ stories highlight how the relentless positivity imperative to be ‘proactive’ and ‘resilient’ during the pandemic became a source of emotional and bodily exhaustion, prompting them to create new digital practices. For some young women, even connecting with friends and family via social media felt ‘too much’ at times, as they experienced a disconnect between the expectations to ‘stay positive’ and ‘be productive’, with their emotional and affective respondings to the radical social, health and economic disruptions and stressors surfaced through the pandemic. To paraphrase Pedwell (2017), the intensities of pandemic networked affect offered a ‘jolt or shock’, moving young women to think, feel and act differently, attuning to alternative possibilities for digital habits and tendencies to ‘become otherwise’ (165).

Conclusion

Drawing upon interviews with a diverse sample of 45 young women living in New Zealand, this article highlights the need for new ways of thinking about youth engagement with social media. Beyond dominant framings of social media as ‘bad’ and having negative effects on young women’s mental health, a networked affect approach ‘thinks affect and habit, feeling and action, passivity and activity together as imbricated within the non-linear temporalities’ of material life (Pedwell 2017, 152). The COVID-19 pandemic evoked new networked affective intensities and digital intimacies for young women. The young women in our sample spent many more hours on their devices (computers, phones, tablets) for education, work, entertainment, escapism (from boredom and the stressors of pandemic life), creativity, connection and fun. No longer solely for the purposes of entertainment and connection, their devices evoked multiple and contradictory affects (i.e. desire, comfort, hope, fear, anger, frustration, guilt) exacerbated through the pandemic ‘positivity imperative’ in which young women were expected to perform proactive, productive, and resilient approaches to everyday life.

More than documenting these digital intensities, in the later part of this paper we revealed what pandemic networked affect ‘does’, with guilt, anger and ‘ugly feelings’ (i.e. bodily dissatisfaction) prompting some young women towards new ways of thinking and living with digital technologies. Through the emergence of new digital intimacies and affective intensities, young women came to renegotiate their relationships with social media and digital technologies, actively navigating boundaries around their own digital networks to protect themselves during a time of stress, uncertainty and increased pressures to perform positive and proactive approaches to pandemic life. While young women may not necessarily be self-governing under the same set of rules neoliberal society would apply to them, their engagement is nevertheless varied and agentic. In sum, the digital intensities of the networked pandemic were an ‘affective jolt’, encouraging many young women to actively renegotiate their relations with digital technologies.

Young women’s engagement with social media is often a site of moral panic, with emphasis on risks and vulnerabilities. Such narratives give rise to highly paternalistic calls for interventions in young women’s lives that fail to listen to their experiences or acknowledge their agency in navigating digital spaces. Engaging networked affect and contextualized with a pandemic atmosphere of anxiety, fear, boredom and an all-pervasive positivity imperative, this paper highlights the need to move beyond binaries of social media as good or bad for young women. During the COVID-19 pandemic, networked affect was felt in and through young women’s bodies and subjectivities in a range of ways, with negative and positive affects circulating and resonating in and through their bodies (i.e. body image, weight gain, sleep, frustration, anger). Digital technologies were being felt and lived differently, thus prompting new questions, alternative actions, and ethics of care for themselves and others. In so doing, this paper highlights the need for researchers, policy makers and commentators to move beyond dominant narratives of the impacts of social media on young women’s mental health and wellbeing, towards revised and updated approaches that recognize young women’s social media practices as highly relational, responsive, and deeply affective, visceral, and entangled in many aspects of their everyday lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royal Society of New Zealand James Cook Research Fellowship [grant number JCF-21-UOW-001].