“Just a place to keep track of myself”: eating disorders, social media, and the quantified self

ABSTRACT

In order to better understand the functional significance of pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) online spaces for users, the current study investigates identity performance as it plays out on pro-ED Tumblr and Instagram account bios. We used data scraping methodologies to illuminate key facets of pro-ED social media culture beyond thinspiration, and found that pro-ED Tumblr and Instagram bios commonly utilize self-tracking and self-quantification (e.g., self-tracking data regarding exercise and food intake, lowest weight, current weight) to represent online personas. Drawing from this data, we suggest the importance of understanding pro-ED social media use as a mode of enacting eating disorder practices and articulating eating-disordered identities online. More specifically, we posit that self-quantification and self-tracking on social media can be seen as a way that individuals with eating disorders to extend practices of self-containment and control online in a world that increasingly blends online and offline life. By understanding the multifaceted psychological functions of pro-ED social media use we can build more informed interventions aimed at minimizing individuals’ needs to engage in such spaces in the first place, which in turn might have a preventive impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• eating disorders
• quantified self
• self-tracking
• digital methods
• pro-ed

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. There are problems with terming all eating disorder centric content that is not explicitly pro-recovery pro-ED, especially given how many of the users in our datasets specify that they are not pro-ED. However, this issue frankly merits a paper of its own and is outside the scope of the current study. So, for the sake of consistency with the literature we still use the term pro-ED throughout our discussion.

2. While all of the data we collected is publicly available, there are some ethical considerations worth mentioning in terms of citing the users directly. We follow guidelines for online research ethics established by the British Psychological Association and cited by Fuchs’ (2017). These guidelines suggest that online activity where users can “reasonably expect to be observed by strangers” should be open to researchers even without obtaining direct permissions from the users themselves. Even so usernames have been excluded in order to obstruct direct searches of their accounts and to avoid funneling unusual new traffic towards them.

3. Bolded emphases added.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda K. Greene

Amanda K. Greene is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate at Lehigh University’s Humanities Lab –a university-wide center that curates collaborative, interdisciplinary dialogue, pedagogy, and research. Drawing on her background in English Language and Literature and Science, Technology, and Society, Greene’s research operates at the nexus of feminist technoscience, media theory, and disability studies. While it spans multiple fields across the humanities and social sciences her scholarship is bound together by a driving concern about how everyday habits of visual media readership shape human bodies and embodied practices of sense-making. She has recently been published in venues such as Feminist Theory, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Information, Communication, Society, and Twentieth Century Literature. E-mail: [email protected]

Lisa M. Brownstone

Lisa M. Brownstone is a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice at the University of Denver’s Morgridge College of Education Department of Counseling Psychology. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as her predoctoral clinical internship at the Denver VA Medical Center and postdoctoral fellowship at Eating Disorder Care of Denver. Her scholarship, clinical work, and teaching focus on disordered eating and body distress, LGBTQ+ health, trauma, stigma, and psychotherapy. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Eating Disorders, Transgender Health, Psychotherapy, and Psychology of Women Quarterly. E-mail: [email protected]