Contemporary Social Identities in a Platform Society: Fragmentation, Mediation and the Search for Belonging

Abstract

Social identity has become one of the most consequential and least stable concepts in contemporary social science. This article asks how collective identities are formed, maintained and contested in a period characterised by declining national attachment among younger cohorts, intensifying partisan and cultural sorting, super-diverse urban populations, and the algorithmic mediation of self-presentation. It reports a comparative secondary analysis that synthesises evidence from seventeen survey programmes, four qualitative studies of digital identity and two recent psychometric investigations of affective polarisation. The findings identify four movements. First, the intensity of national identification has weakened sharply in the United States - from roughly ninety per cent of adults reporting high pride in the early 2000s to fifty-eight per cent in 2025 - with the decline concentrated among younger cohorts and among political minorities within the national community. Second, identities are increasingly sorted, so that national, partisan, cultural and platform affiliations align and reinforce one another. Third, algorithmic curation has become an active participant in identity formation, converting externally suggested categories into internal self-descriptions. Fourth, measurement practice lags behind these changes: instruments developed for an era of stable national categories capture only part of what identity now does. The article proposes a six-fold typology of contemporary identity configurations and argues that the central policy question is no longer which identity people hold but whether the institutional ecology allows multiple identities to coexist without producing threat.