Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital materialism scholarship – and particularly Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’ – with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what they find important and valuable about the platform. Findings are presented in the form of seven case studies of Facebook use, identifying lively affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break. We argue that this theoretical perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of the distributed and relational agencies generated with and through Facebook assemblages that motivate people to stay on this social media platform.

尽管经常遭到Facebook的批评，但Facebook是全球使用最广泛的社交媒体平台。在本文中，我们将至关重要的唯物主义学术观点，尤其是简·贝内特（Jane Bennett）的“事物力量”概念，与我们对澳大利亚Facebook用户的实证研究结合在一起，以确定他们对平台的重要意义和价值。研究结果以Facebook使用的七个案例研究的形式呈现，确定了促使人们继续使用Facebook，调节其使用或休息时间的生动的情感力量，关系联系和代理能力。