Chapter 9. Social media influencers and #DigitalDetoxDay

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of an anti-stigma mental health campaign called Digital Detox Day, which was first organised in 2020 with the aim of encouraging people not to use social media for one day. Despite foregrounding the positive effects of digital detox, the campaign was paradoxically promoted by social media influencers (SMIs), whose popularity is contingent on an active online presence. To explore how SMIs position themselves in relation to the campaign and digital detox, a multimodal discourse analysis of 100 Instagram posts with the hashtag #DigitalDetoxDay was conducted. Having examined the functions of the multimodal semiotic resources adopted by the SMIs in this data, the paper shows that the #DigitalDetoxDay posts afford the SMIs’ self-presentation authenticity and relatability and thus do not disrupt but corroborate the characteristic image of SMIs.