Becoming "That Girl": A Digital Ethnography of Productivity and Wellness Culture on YouTube

This paper uses a combination of digital ethnographic methods and in-depth interviewing to examine productivity and wellness culture on YouTube in the wake of the 2020 "that girl" trend. The first section focuses on how the interviewees relate to productivity and routine. Second, conceptions of authenticity in "that girl" content are analyzed on both the content creation side and the viewer side. The third section examines how influencers and viewers negotiate boundaries as an act of self-preservation in creating and consuming productivity content. The last section focuses on TikTok and how reactions to wellness and productivity content differ depending on whether it is short-form or long-form. I explore the effect of consuming "that girl" content on viewers while keeping in constant dialogue with creators' own conceptions of their content's impact by examining their values and beliefs surrounding authenticity, productivity, and consumerism. Drawing upon updated theories of front stage and backstage behavior for the digital world (Goffman 1956) such as porous authenticity (Abidin 2018) and the productivity of negative affect (Berryman and Kavka 2018; Reade 2020), I find that productivity and wellness influencers operate in a gray area of constructed intimacy with their viewers. Further, I find that influencers depend on their community of subscribers to give their work meaning, while viewers often attach themselves more to a genre of content than a specific creator and negotiate boundaries with wellness content to mitigate the negative effects it can have on their mental health.