An infinite project to nowhere: #wellness on Instagram
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wellness industry has emerged as a multi-trillion-dollar global industry and the online hashtag #Wellness trend, with over 68 million posts on Instagram, is growing in popularity every day. We analyzed 373 posts from the hashtag #Wellness to explore how wellness is represented and mobilized on Instagram. Using reflexive thematic analysis and drawing from critical feminist theorizing on biopedagogies and healthism, we generated five themes: (infinite) wellness project of the self, aesthetic ideal = wellness expert, wellness labour, just choose wellness, and infinitely consuming wellness. We observed wellness being predominantly represented by imagery of a young, lean, white, able-bodied, affluent woman. Wellness was also discursively promoted as ostensibly easy to achieve through relentless effort, discipline, and consumption. We found #Wellness on Instagram to be another source of biopedagogies, or expert instructions for living, reproducing healthism, the thought that health is an individual responsibility, and reifying Western aesthetic idealization of bodies as conflated with health and well-being. Our findings highlight how sociocultural ideologies, including neoliberalism, biopedagogies, and healthism, have intense command and insidious pervasion into the current wellness and media culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".