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Formative Media: Psychoanalysis and Digital Media Platforms

Author(s) : Steffen Kruger

Reviews and Endorsements

Krüger's brilliant study propels digital media analysis to the next level. Our primary concern in an age of platforms is formation, not information. What kind of subjects are we becoming?
Jodi Dean, author of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

At a time where critical analysis of platforms is more needed than ever, this book is essential reading for academics, students and anyone concerned about the fragile future of humanity and the digital. It is a pathbreaking, refreshing and absorbing contribution to internet studies, social media and platform studies as well as the entire field of media and communication research. Steffen Krüger takes us on a deep dive into the histories of the key platforms of our age, Facebook, YouTube, X (Twitter), Instagram and Google, and how they form the human subject in constitutive terms. He constructs a formative psychosocial theory of interaction for each platform by paying close attention to their technological features and user interactions. As this study shows, big tech companies have assembled their own logics and tools which in different ways have got us hooked, but not as commonly presented in academic and popular debates. This book once and for all shows that it is only psychoanalysis that can help us make sense of the complex and contradictory dynamics between platforms and users today. Those who really want to understand platforms, are now finally able to!
Jacob Johanssen, Associate Professor in Communications, St. Mary’s University, UK

This book breaks new ground in showing how online interactions are shaped by digital platforms as we perform the various versions of ourselves that they afford. Twitter/X elicits the joker, Facebook the seducer, Instagram the anxious narcissist, while YouTube feeds our addictions, and Google our obsessions. There is nothing glib about these metaphors. Krüger asks what kind of subjects we are becoming through our media use, responding with a provocative range of insights into contemporary culture, delivered with verve and a wide-ranging, lively, scholarship.
Lynn Froggett, Professor of Psychosocial Welfare and Director of the Psychosocial Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire, UK