Positivity and transparency on social media

when influencers sell performance

Abstract

Given that contemporary social transformations have reconfigured the ways in which subjects present and perceive themselves in digital environments, this article aims to investigate discourses of positivity on the social media platform Instagram, based on narratives published by digital influencers in vlog format. To this end, we selected as corpus an utterance published by Júlia Vieira, a prominent media personality in the digital sphere, through which she shares daily routines that, from her perspective, are considered productive. The study was conducted through a combination of linguistic and cultural theories, with a central focus on the assumptions of Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA), which understands the utterance as concrete — that is, socially and historically situated — and on reflections about identity in postmodernity, drawing from the contributions of the philosopher Han (2015, 2017). Methodologically, we adopted a qualitative and ethnographic approach to data analysis, which allowed us to achieve the aforementioned objective. As results, we observed that, in order to gain credibility on social media, Júlia Vieira reinforces images of a performance-driven subject, employing discourses of positivity/productivity and meritocracy.