Rob Horning’s Me Meme is not an easy read, but it’s worth the investment. He doesn’t waste time with a fluffy intro, he just jumps straight in:

With social media, the compelling opportunities for self-expression outstrip the supply of things we have to confidently say about ourselves. The demand for self-expression overwhelms what we might dredge up from “inside.” So the “self” being expressed has to be posited elsewhere: We start to borrow from the network, from imagined future selves, from the media in which we can now constitute ourselves.

There are too many great quotes in here to choose from, so I’ll go with one more and then just encourage you to read the whole thing:

We shift from consumerist pleasures of fantasizing about how owning certain branded goods would make us into a certain kind of person and secure us a certain sort of affirmation to fantasizing about triumphant moments of social quantification, about getting likes and retweets, having lots of Tumblr activity, etc. […] Without viral content, you are in danger of becoming a blank.