Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series: Dr. Niall Docherty

April 10th, 2025 - 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm PT

Spilker Building, Room 232 348 Via Pueblo
Stanford, CA 94305

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Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-being on Social Media

Join Stanford PACS and the Cyber Policy Center for a monthly gathering that explores critical insights on the intersections and implications of technology and society. The Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series is a thought-provoking forum on the Stanford campus featuring leading experts and scholars examining the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality.

Join us for a discussion with Dr. Niall Docherty on the governance of well-being on social media. The psychological and well-being risks of social media are commonly known and well understood. So far, however, no meaningful political regulation or change in platform business models have dealt with the problem head on. Up against the stated issues of platforms, individual users are instead encouraged to adopt healthy scrolling habits and practices of conscious use – by platforms and governments alike. It seems digital self-discipline is the tonic for platform toxicities today.

In this preview of his forthcoming book Healthy Users (UC Press, May 2025), Niall Docherty will take a closer look at these beliefs and reveal the complex relations of power expressed through their articulation and enactment. Presenting findings from empirical research, this talk will explore how discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance, combining logics of neoliberalism, responsibilization, practices of psychologized person-making, and persuasive capitalist interfaces. Because of this, this talk will show how the problem of social media well-being takes us onto ground far beyond its obvious thresholds, toward much more fundamental questions about what it means to live well in digital environments, the restrictions this may impose upon us, and the ways in which we may overcome them if we so wish.

Dr. Niall Docherty is a Lecturer and Assistant Professor in Data, AI and Society in the Information School at The University of Sheffield. His work explores the philosophical and political stakes of digital well-being, appearing in interdisciplinary venues such as ACM CHI, Information, Communication and Society, Science as Culture, Business and Society, and Social Media + Society. Previously, Niall was a postdoc in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England, and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. Niall’s recent projects examine ‘empathetic AI’ and the algorithmic management of emotion in the workplace.

Please arrive 5 minutes early to avoid disrupting the guest speaker.

Request disability accommodations and access information here.

This event is made possible with support from the Humanities Seed Grant from Stanford Public Humanities.