Formative Media presents a psychoanalytic and psychosocial inquiry into the significance of the most widely used digital platforms – including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter (X), and Instagram – and the relational styles that users cultivate and habituate in their interplay with these platforms. Steffen Krüger assesses the formative effects of these platforms, considering who we are and how we are becoming who we are in relation to, as well as mediated through, digital platforms. The book considers Facebook in conversation with the Freudian theory of Eros and the Live/Love drive, then homes in on the primitive forms of orality, attachment, dependence, and symbiosis in relation to YouTube.

Krüger then expands the discussion of orality with an inquiry into the notions of mastery, control, and domination that Google unfolds and activates in its search function, considers narcissism in the context of Instagram, and examines hate speech and aggression on Twitter. The book focuses on the most salient, most talked about aspects, features, and activities of commercial, corporate social media culture to inquire into the formational pushes and pulls of these activities in their contexts for our subjectivities and sense of self. Showing in detail how digital media platforms have advanced into central “socialisation agencies,” Formative Media will be of great interest to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic, psychocultural, and psychosocial theory, critical digital media studies, and interactional theory.