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Among a plethora of books on the subject, few grapple with social media malaise in as bold yet nuanced a way as does Formative Media. Weaving together a vast array of media research with insiders’ accounts of social media corporate culture, Krüger champions psychoanalytical theories where more conventional sociological approaches fall short of grasping social-psychological dynamics, lacking historical perspective or different interpretative vantage points which could lend new insights.
Krüger’s undertaking to bring psychoanalytical perspectives to bear on issues that defy disciplinary boundaries builds on Alfred Lorenzer’s work (Rothe et al., 2022) and the recent revival of formalism spearheaded by Anna Kornbluh (2019) and Eugenie Brinkema (2021). Their shared concern for formal-structural and aesthetic features captures the conceptual thread of the book connoted by the wordplay in-formation which readily gives away the aesthetic impulse behind Krüger’s ‘caricaturing hermeneutic’ method. The extent to which Krüger exploits the formalist return may not be apparent, yet it lends a fitting framework for an inquiry that aims to cover an awful lot of psychoanalytical tradition, stemming from Freud and Lacan but also encompassing relational and object-relational schools, ego- and self-psychology, and not least the critical sociologies of Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias. The breadth and accessible presentation make this a relevant reference for newcomers into the psychoanalytical tradition and media-and-communication scholars readily familiar with the subdiscipline.
The key premise of the book is that major digital media platforms perform internally diverse yet complementary functions which carry a formative influence over users’ subjectivity understood in object-relational or social interactional terms. These formative functions are outlined in five chapters, each turning on a different media platform. The notion of Eros in Freud’s drives theory helps to capture Facebook as