Case Study 2: From Engagement to Agency — Three Users, Three Paths

Overview

When people become aware of the mechanics of platform design — when they understand the variable reward schedules, the engagement optimization, the dark pattern taxonomy — their responses vary substantially. Research on digital behavior change identifies several recognizable patterns, which we can map onto three composite user profiles.

These profiles are not meant to be aspirational types or ranked in order of virtue. Each represents a coherent, internally consistent set of choices made by a real type of person in real circumstances. Each involves genuine trade-offs. Each has costs and benefits that the person making these choices has assessed — and would assess differently if their circumstances, values, or needs were different.

The goal is not to tell you which type you should be. The goal is to make the full range of available choices more visible, so that your own choices are more deliberate.

Profile 1: The Minimizer

Composite based on research archetypes from studies of intentional digital disengagement

The person: Daniel, 34, high school history teacher in Portland, Oregon. Married with one child. Has used Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X) since his early twenties. At peak use, spending 2.5–3 hours per day on social platforms.

What changed: Daniel describes a gradual accretion of discomfort rather than a single turning point. He noticed, over a period of about eighteen months, that his relationship to news and current events had shifted from feeling informed to feeling agitated. He could not reliably distinguish between things that had happened (news) and things that were being discussed angrily online (outrage content). He felt, as he described it, "perpetually behind, perpetually upset, and unable to do anything about any of it." He began to associate his phone, specifically, with a feeling he identified as anxious helplessness.

He also noticed that his attention had changed in ways that alarmed him as a teacher. He found it harder to read for extended periods. He found his own patience with slow-developing ideas in class discussions shorter than it had been. He is uncertain whether to attribute this to platform use or to other factors of age and professional stress.

What he did: Daniel's response was significant reduction rather than complete elimination. He deleted Twitter/X entirely — "the cost-benefit was obviously negative and I had no genuine social connection there, just an angry feed of people I agreed with yelling about people I disagreed with." He deleted Facebook from his phone but kept the account active because his family uses Facebook to coordinate and his local neighborhood group is active there; he checks it on a desktop computer roughly once a week. He kept Instagram for a specific reason: his wife posts family photos there and shares them with distant relatives, and he participates in this.

His daily use dropped from approximately 2.5 hours to under 20 minutes. He did not replace the time with other digital activities — he describes reading physical books in the evenings as the primary substitute, and says this has been the change he is most unambiguously pleased about.

What he gains: Daniel reports significantly lower baseline anxiety. He describes his attentional capacity as "noticeably better, though I can't prove it's causal." He reads a complete book per week now, compared to approximately one per month at his peak platform use. He describes his relationship to news as calmer and more informed — he reads two newspapers and a long-form magazine, which he finds produces a better-quality understanding of events than constant news-feed exposure.

What he gives up: He acknowledges that he is more out of the loop on certain cultural conversations. "There are references people make that I don't get. Memes that have come and gone. Drama that apparently everybody was following." He says this bothers him less than he expected. More genuinely costly: he has lost easy contact with some acquaintances. "There are people I was in ambient contact with through social media — we never called or texted, but I had a vague sense of their lives — and now I don't. Some of those were real relationships that just weren't deep enough to survive losing the medium." He misses some of them.

He is honest about what he cannot claim: "I don't know if I'm doing the thing that's right for everyone, or even that would have been right for me at a different life stage. When I was single, in my twenties, those platforms were my social infrastructure. I couldn't have cut them out the way I did now without real social cost."

The lesson: The Minimizer approach works well for people whose primary platform vulnerability is anxiety and attention depletion, who have robust offline social networks, and who find the cost of reduced ambient social contact acceptable. It requires less ongoing management than intentional use approaches — once you've deleted an app, you don't have to keep deciding not to use it. Its costs are social and cultural: real but, for Daniel, acceptable.

Profile 2: The Intentionalist

Composite based on research archetypes from studies of structured platform use

The person: Priya, 26, marketing coordinator at a nonprofit in Chicago. Single. Uses Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn professionally as well as personally. Estimated at peak use: 4–5 hours per day across platforms.

What changed: Priya's path was shaped by the specific intersection of personal use and professional use in a way that made simple reduction impractical. Her job involves social media management — she posts and monitors on behalf of her organization and follows platform trends to inform strategy. Leaving platforms was not a realistic option.

What she became aware of, over time, was the distinction between using platforms as a tool and being used by them. She could spend two hours creating content and coordinating a campaign — purposeful, professional, satisfying — and then fall into an hour of passive consumption that left her feeling empty. She noticed that she couldn't always feel the transition between the two modes happening; she would check a notification for work and find herself, twenty minutes later, having never responded to the notification, deep in content she hadn't chosen and didn't particularly want.

She describes her central problem as "not the amount of time, but the quality of presence. I was there but I wasn't choosing what I was doing there."

What she did: Priya's approach involved creating structural separations between different modes of platform use. She has separate devices for work social media and personal social media — a work phone managed by her employer, with accounts she uses professionally, and her personal phone with accounts she uses for her own life. She keeps these physically separate outside of work hours.

For her personal use, she runs on a time-windowed system: she does not open any personal social media before noon. She has a 45-minute window in the afternoon (typically her lunch break) and a 45-minute window in the evening. Outside those windows, she has turned off all notifications from personal social platforms. The apps are still on her phone; she does not find app presence on the device itself triggering without the notification. She is honest that this required about three weeks to become habitual and that she violated it regularly in the first week.

She also practices what she calls "intentional opening": before opening any app, she names, either aloud or in writing, what she is opening it for. "I'm checking if my friend posted about her trip." "I'm looking for reference images for the poster I'm making." "I'm watching TikTok because I want to decompress for 20 minutes." The last is a legitimate intention; she has decided that deliberately chosen passive consumption, bounded in time, is acceptable and does not require justification.

She reviews her screen time data every Sunday, not to punish herself but to calibrate: "I treat it like a budget. Went over in one category, under in another. What was going on last week?"

What she gains: Priya reports that the quality of her attention within her platform windows is significantly higher. "When I have 45 minutes and I've chosen to use them, I actually enjoy it. I'm present. I'm choosing what I watch." She also reports that the work/personal separation has meaningfully improved her relationship to her job — she no longer feels that her own social media life is contaminated by her professional monitoring role.

She uses Instagram specifically to follow photographers and visual artists and describes this as genuinely enriching. She uses TikTok to follow specific accounts in food, design, and absurdist comedy. She uses the For You page deliberately but not exclusively; she treats it as she would a radio — sometimes she discovers something she loves, sometimes it's noise, and she reserves the right to turn it off.

What she gives up: Priya acknowledges that her approach requires sustained management in a way that Daniel's doesn't. "I have to keep choosing it. If I'm going through a stressful period, the windows slip. If I'm traveling for work and my schedule is disrupted, the habit breaks and I have to rebuild it." She finds this less burdensome than she expected, but she is honest that it is not passive — it is an ongoing relationship with her own behavior.

She has also noticed that she is more aware of her own patterns than she was before, which is not always comfortable. "I can feel myself reaching for my phone as an avoidance move now. I know exactly what I'm doing. Sometimes I still do it. But I feel it, and I didn't used to."

The lesson: The Intentionalist approach works well for people whose platforms are genuinely multi-purpose (professional and personal), who have significant social investment in their online presence, and who find the idea of significant reduction either impractical or genuinely undesirable. It requires more ongoing management than minimization but offers more of the benefits of platform use. Its costs are attentional — the ongoing effort of managing a complex set of practices — and its benefits are proportional to how consistently those practices are maintained.

Profile 3: The Creator

Composite based on research archetypes from studies of platform use among creative practitioners

The person: Jordan, 22, recent college graduate, working part-time in a coffee shop while building a freelance illustration and design practice in Minneapolis. Uses Instagram, TikTok, and Behance. At peak use: 3–4 hours per day, but with highly variable content — significant fractions were portfolio-related, community-building, or research, not purely consumption.

What changed: Jordan's relationship to platforms shifted not primarily because of discomfort with consumption, but because of a strategic realization about creation. Jordan describes watching, over the course of a year, as the illustration accounts they followed went through a cycle: posting work, gaining followers, adapting their work to platform conventions to maintain algorithmic visibility, gradually producing work that looked increasingly like what the algorithm rewarded — which was also work that looked increasingly like everyone else's algorithmically rewarded work. "There's a kind of flattening that happens," Jordan said. "The platforms reward certain aesthetics, certain formats, certain emotional tones. People optimize for those. And the work gets blander, even though the numbers get bigger."

Jordan decided, explicitly, to use the platforms as distribution tools without letting them shape the work. This required a conscious separation between "what I make" and "what I post."

What they do: Jordan's daily practice is structured around creation before consumption. They spend the first two hours of each workday on client work or personal projects, with no social media access during that window. They have removed all social media apps from their laptop — their creation device — and use only their phone for platform access, which creates a physical and behavioral separation between making and scrolling.

Their posting strategy is deliberate: they post new work twice per week to Instagram, with a caption that explains the process and thinking behind the piece. They do not use trending sounds or formats unless they happen to align with the work. They track their engagement data but treat it descriptively rather than prescriptively — "I notice this type of work gets more engagement, but that doesn't mean I should make more of it unless I also want to."

They use TikTok to post process videos — time-lapses of work in progress, commentary on design thinking — and have built a modest following of approximately 8,000 accounts there. They follow specific accounts (other illustrators, designers, art directors) rather than relying primarily on algorithmic discovery.

For consumption, Jordan has a deliberate "research" practice: on Wednesdays and Saturdays, they spend 30 minutes specifically looking at work they admire and bookmarking reference material. Outside those sessions, they treat platform consumption as explicitly secondary — they do it, but they've decided it's not the primary thing platforms are for in their life.

What they gain: Jordan has built a freelance client base entirely through platform relationships — four consistent clients who found them through Instagram or TikTok, generating sufficient income to fund their independent work alongside the part-time job. They describe feeling a sense of authorship over their own presence online that they did not feel when they were primarily a consumer. "I use the platform instead of the platform using me" is how they put it — acknowledging that this formulation is a bit too tidy, but that it gestures at something real.

They also describe their work as, in their own assessment, better than it was during periods of higher consumption. "I was consuming a lot of the same reference, and I was making work that looked like what I was consuming. Reducing the consumption and making the consumption more deliberate made the work more mine."

What they give up: Jordan is explicit about the trade-offs. Building a following through deliberate, non-optimized posting is slower than posting content designed for algorithmic amplification. "I could have more followers if I made Reels with trending audio. I've chosen not to, and that choice has a cost." They also note that their approach requires privilege — the ability to work more slowly, to not be dependent on rapid platform growth for income, to have the time to build a practice deliberately. "This works for me right now, at this stage. I don't know that it would work for someone who needed the platform income to pay rent this month."

They are also honestly uncertain about what happens as their career develops. "The algorithm is always changing. What works now won't work in two years. I might have to revisit all of this."

The lesson: The Creator approach works well for people whose relationship with platforms is explicitly instrumental — who are building something using the platform as a tool — and who have sufficient creative confidence and financial flexibility to resist optimizing their work for algorithmic reward. Its costs are growth speed and, potentially, reach. Its benefits are a sense of creative authorship and a platform presence that reflects the user's actual values and work. It is not accessible to everyone in the same way — it assumes a certain kind of practice and a certain tolerance for slow building that are not universally available.

Synthesis: What These Three Paths Have in Common

Despite their differences, Daniel, Priya, and Jordan share several features in their approaches to digital agency.

They started with observation. None of them made changes immediately upon becoming aware of platform mechanics. Each went through a period of observation — noting their own patterns, identifying the specific gap between what they wanted and what they were getting — before making changes. The observation phase grounded their choices in their actual patterns rather than in general prescriptions.

They made choices aligned with their specific circumstances. Daniel's minimization made sense given his offline social infrastructure and his particular vulnerability pattern (anxiety, attention depletion). It would not make sense for Priya, who needs platforms professionally. Priya's intentionalist structure made sense given her professional/personal intersection. It would not serve Jordan, who needs a specific relationship between creation and distribution. Each person built a framework from their own values and circumstances.

They acknowledged costs. None of them claimed to have found a cost-free solution. Daniel misses ambient contact with acquaintances. Priya manages the ongoing burden of sustained behavioral practice. Jordan grows more slowly than the algorithm would allow. This honesty is part of what makes these approaches sustainable — they are not built on the fiction that there is a way to have all the benefits of platforms with none of the costs.

They treat their frameworks as living practices, not achieved states. All three describe ongoing calibration. All three describe periodic failures and recommitments. None of them describes a moment of transformation after which the problem was solved. This is consistent with what Chapter 40 argues: agency is practiced, not achieved.

They did not find that awareness alone changed behavior. Each of them moved through awareness toward structural change — changes to their environment, their schedule, their device configuration, their habits. The knowledge was necessary but not sufficient. The knowledge had to be translated into design.

What the Research Says

The composite profiles in this case study are drawn from several bodies of research that are worth noting explicitly.

Studies of intentional digital disengagement (including work by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, the Pew Research Center, and the Center for Humane Technology) consistently find that users who report the greatest success in managing platform use share several characteristics:

• Structural rather than willpower-based approaches. Successful disengagers rely on environment design, time restrictions, and device separation rather than on in-the-moment decisions to resist.
• Specificity about goals. Users who articulate specific, valued goals for their platform use — rather than vague aspirations to "use less" — show better behavioral outcomes.
• Tolerance for imperfection. Users who expect setbacks and treat them as data rather than failures maintain their practices more consistently over time.
• Social context. The social context of platform use shapes outcomes significantly. Users with robust offline social networks find platform reduction more sustainable than users for whom platforms are a primary social environment.

The research also consistently finds that "digital detox" approaches — complete, time-limited abstinence — produce short-term behavioral change that tends not to persist when the detox period ends, unless the person makes structural changes to their relationship with the platform during the detox period. Abstinence without structure tends to produce a return to baseline.

This is consistent with what the three profiles demonstrate: the path to sustained digital agency is not a break from the pattern, but a redesign of the conditions within which the pattern operates.

Discussion Questions

1. Which of the three profiles resonates most with your own circumstances and values? What would you take from each that is most applicable to your situation?

2. The case study notes that Jordan's Creator approach "requires privilege" — including time, financial flexibility, and creative confidence. What does this observation suggest about the equity dimensions of digital agency? Are some people structurally better positioned to exercise digital agency than others? What follows from this?

3. All three profiles involve trade-offs. Which of the identified costs do you find most genuinely costly? How would you weigh them against the described benefits?

4. The research finding that "awareness alone does not change behavior" is a recurring theme. If knowledge is necessary but not sufficient, what else is required? How does this research finding intersect with the book's broader argument about individual agency versus structural change?

5. Consider someone who cannot use any of these three approaches — someone for whom platforms are their primary social world, professional necessity, and primary source of community. What does digital agency look like for that person? What does the book's framework offer them?

End of Case Study 2