Research in online spaces: 'Tumblr' and eating 'disorder'

Online communities, social media sites and personal messaging have become significant spaces for interaction, self expression and the construction of identities for young people in contemporary culture. Most research on young people online tends to focus on the negative aspects of online interaction – for example focusing on bullying, sexual victimization and ‘internet addiction’. Much attention has also been paid to the role of the internet in the promotion of ‘disordered’ eating – the emergence of the pro-ana movement in online spaces. Key to dominant understandings of ‘eating disorder’ amongst young people, and particularly young women, is the notion of secrecy. Calorie restriction (and particularly self-starvation), excessive exercise, and purging behaviours have historically been understood in mental health contexts as hidden experiences, practiced in secrecy . In this paper, I explore the visual and interactive formats enabled through social media platforms, and the way that these might be seen as shifting the nature of ‘eating disorder’ amongst contemporary young people. I focus on the platform ‘Tumblr’, a blogging platform that is very specifically marketed for young people and young adults, which incorporates the intensively interactive but highly individualized elements of social media associated with twitter with a highly visual format. Within this format, I suggest that young people’s engagement with disordered eating is shifting in form, and that this is evidenced by a particular kind of performativity in evidence in tumblr postings about eating and weight management. This paper will not engage in further pathologisation of either the internet or ‘eating disorder’, but instead will explore the internet as a cultural space and a community of practice, within which specific practices of eating and body management are constructed and performed