What is a Logic?

Over the course of the next few months we’ll be treating this newsletter more like a Substack, sharing drafts from Chand and Ethan’s forthcoming book “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year with MIT Press.

Do you have thoughts about this chapter? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Traditionally, field guides focus on the natural world, offering descriptions of different species or families that help readers identify them. As this field guide is focused on social media, we will need a different locus than species or families for our taxonomy. We’ve settled on “logics.” We use “logic,” not in the sense of formal or symbolic logic, but as a term for underlying structures, patterns, and forces. (This is a fairly common usage in the scholarly world. E.g., the “logic of capitalism.”) For simplicity’s sake we will often use “logic” as a taxonomic device, as in “the logic Anonymity, and “pattern” as a catch-all for the meaning of logic we are adopting.

The logics in this book illuminate the world of social media through descriptions of key patterns that are valuable independent of the particulars of individual platforms. Unlike bird species, individual social media platforms often change on a daily or weekly basis, ensuring that a field guide focused on individual platforms would be almost immediately out of date. However, there are key patterns we can identify that are relevant across time—these are logics. For example, whether or not Reddit exists in 20 years has little bearing on the relevance of the logic Forums. Our description of interest-based online communities will apply to whatever replaces Reddit, as interest-based online communities will live on whether or not Reddit is their main home at a given point in time.

Our approach is not without precedent. Architects and software engineers might see parallels between our collection of logics and “pattern languages,” a term first coined by architect Christopher Alexander to describe the collection of timeless ways of designing buildings and towns found in his book, A Pattern Language. Alexander attempts to outline archetypal architectural patterns that seem “likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.” His goal was to empower anyone to participate in the design of buildings and towns and to encourage beautiful designs.

Our project is necessarily somewhat different—social media is a much newer technology than buildings and towns, which means we are less confident than Alexander that our insights will be relevant in 500 years. Additionally, while Alexander’s work focused on patterns he wanted to celebrate, our work is meant to be at least as descriptive as prescriptive: logics highlight important characteristics of social media, good or bad. However, similar to Alexander, we hope our diverse collection of logics will expand people’s sense of the possibilities for social media and improve their understanding of it, empowering them to better participate in the design and governance of the digital public sphere.

The logics are presented in a variety of formats. For example, well-established logics are more likely to rely on examples and empirical evidence, while less-established logics are more likely to rely on analysis and theory. Many logics rely on the analytical frameworks found in the next chapter. Some logics center around a single anecdote, while others take a 30,000 foot view. Lengths vary, from 500 to 3000 words, usually as a function of obviousness (e.g., the logic of Chinese social media requires more explanation for audiences in the West than logics they encounter every day). However, there are two common features to all the descriptions. First, each logic begins with a couple of sentences in bold that capture its essence. We provide this for clarity, convenience, and cohesion. Second, each logic ends with a list of related logics. We provide this to round out each logic with additional context and to reflect the overlapping and linked nature of the logics. They may make more sense as sets or clusters rather than as free-standing works, though we think each is valuable on its individual merits.

A natural question to ask at this point is, “How did you select the logics that appear in the book?” The logics were distilled from our experiences researching and using social media and through conversations with colleagues. They are influenced by our sense that the common understanding of social media is shallow and narrow and that social media can and should be a vehicle for ends beyond entertainment and profit. Some logics are obvious, like Social Networks or Chat, others less so, like The 80/20 Rule of Small Social Networks or Civic. The logics are not a comprehensive guide, rather, they represent a limited set of descriptions informed by our incomplete understanding of important patterns that animate social media. We view them as alive and evolving and invite others to improve on our flawed collection with the hope that this is the beginning of a larger project to better understand and reimagine the digital public sphere.