Mapping the User Trajectory: Black Women’s Digital Well-being Networks and Leveraging Social Support Affordances

Scholars posited that Black digital practice is often enacted in pursuit of emancipation or pleasure. Black women’s digital health and well-being networks unsettle the emancipation/pleasure binary and warrant investigation. Building upon affordance theory, social support literature, and scholarship on Black digital practice, the present research explored how Black women millennial health and well-being content creators afford social media. The researcher conducted 28 semi-structured phone and video interviews with Black women millennials who used one of three health-related Instagram hashtags. A thematic analysis revealed that the participants followed a common path when engaging with the digital well-being networks. This common path, termed the user trajectory, contextualized the shifting social support affordances that the participants extracted from the digital networks. Findings indicated that participants relied on the digital well-being networks to afford informational, emotional, and social network support. Implications for health disparities and health campaigns are also discussed.