Social media has again come under fire, with charges that it has been designed to be "addictive."

Be that as it may, what people use it for can also lead to a deep dependence.

Of particular importance are self-making tasks—exploring identity, finding a community, generating visibility.

Two recent jury verdicts have cast a harsh light on social media. A New Mexico jury found Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, negligent for misleading users about the safety of its platforms. A day later, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube liable for “addictive” design features, such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, that ensnared a young user, causing her significant mental health harms.1

Covering the L.A. trial, a New York Times reporter anticipated the verdict. Criticism of social media has been growing for a decade, he noted, and although 3 billion people use Facebook and Instagram, that doesn’t mean they “approve of social media or even like it.” But, sounding like someone talking about addiction, he added, “they just can’t imagine being without it.”2

Why not? Why does social media have such a grip on so many? Besides Silicon Valley skullduggery, a place to look is in what people say they need it for. In an earlier post, I considered our diminishing social connection. The use of social media, I argued, was both an indicator of the decline in community participation and growing loneliness and a response to it. Here, I want to take up another social need that long predated social media. We might call this task “self-formation,” the now-familiar process/business/ordeal (take your pick) of producing and sustaining a personal identity.

Since at least the 1960s, the disciplinary society has been disappearing. That is, the stable institutions that had constrained individuals and set clear expectations for them, whether through families, established communities, or tightly regulated traditions, have eroded and lost much of their hold. Important life choices, such as those pertaining to careers, marriages, and family roles, were, in the words of psychologist Barry Schwartz, once “made by default.” But now, he adds, after the changes of recent decades, very little is.3 Questions of who we will be, what we will do, and where we will go have become matters of genuine (if, in practice, always constrained) choice. Our self—as we all know firsthand—is now a kind of project, which, by our own lights and resources, we must actively work on and develop.

The task of self-formation is demanding. We must find our own meaning and purpose, decide what work we’ll pursue, negotiate our relationships, create our opportunities, establish our status, and so on. This work, the work of becoming ourselves, requires a lot of careful social interpretation. We must become adept at monitoring ourselves, at gathering information on how we are doing, and at telling a coherent story about ourselves in terms of the ideas and practices we identify with and incorporate. Since the future is shifting and unpredictable, we must also be prepared for continuous change and self-narrative revision.

While we do the work of self-formation on ourselves, our project is reliant on institutions, available social spaces, and other people. Much of what we need—knowledge, feedback, and recognition—we cannot produce for ourselves. This is where, for many, the use of social media has come to serve a critical function.

Social Media Functions

Based on surveys, interviews, and other research,4 we can divide the uses to which people employ social media for self-formation into at least three categories:

As a space for learning about and exploring identity options.

Social media provides access to information and communication far beyond the confines of locality, giving us a window into the lives of many more people than we would ever meet. We can see how others are living and working out personal identities, learn about alternative values, and experience (via the medium) phenomena that we might never encounter in our daily lives. Social media opens new frontiers: new ways to imagine and facilitate self-formation with options and models beyond those available offline.

As a means to interact with others who share common identities, abilities/disabilities, or interests.

Social media makes available non-local, like-minded communities of people who can be a source of advice and feedback, offer emotional support and help in coping with any number of life issues and circumstances, and serve as an audience for self-expression and identity experimentation. Significantly, as some media scholars stress, these groups offer a way for people to distance themselves from their ordinary relations. Communities can validate personal experience that feels odd or inexplicable, or is criticized by others, as genuine, normal, or expectable. And they can acknowledge and recognize new identities as worthy of social approval and respect, even when others in one’s locale don’t.

As a platform to display and confirm self-formation success.

Social media creates a public forum for narrating and broadcasting one’s activity and creative character. Posting to sites such as Facebook generates an emergent and curated autobiography that can be referred to, commented on, “liked,” and shared. Social media “can give us,” one student I interviewed said, “the power to affirm ourselves even more and to highlight our abilities.” And, she added, on a screen, it is “much easier to describe yourself just as you like.” These platform features can be especially advantageous for social advancement. In competitive contexts, social or professional, people need to confidently stand out from others. Highlighting one’s abilities and distinctiveness gives these qualities visibility, without which they may not be seen or credited.

Of course, social media can and does have many negative consequences for self-formation. Recent commentary has focused heavily on the negatives, especially for youth. But by considering how people use social media as an infrastructure for their self-making, we can also see how they might become highly dependent on them: If they are not “addicted,” in the sense being argued in the tort cases—as helplessly under the influence of the addictive engineering of the platforms—they are nonetheless deeply resistant to letting go, or in the case of youth, letting parents interfere. Perhaps many “just can’t imagine being without it,” because their very sense of self hangs in the balance.

1. Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac, and Eli Tan. “Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case,” New York Times, March 25, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/technology/social-media-addiction-society-verdict.html.

2. David Streitfeld. “Social Media Addiction Trial Nears End. Society Long Ago Rendered Its Verdict.” New York Times, March 12, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/technology/social-media-addiction-society-verdict.html.

3. Barry Schwartz, The Battle for Human Nature, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 16.

4. See, for example, McKinsey Health Institute. “Gen Z Mental Health: The Impact of Tech and Social Media,” April 28, 2023. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/gen-z-mental-health-the-impact-of-tech-and-social-media#/

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