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In 2021, we published An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with the Knight First Amendment Institute. 

It was the culmination of a months-long exploration of alternative social media “logics” meant to encourage fresh thinking about the possibilities for social media. In the two-plus years since, we’ve been heartened to see the book used in numerous classes and publications about the digital public sphere. People consistently reference it as one of their favorite projects to come out of our lab.

However, we always felt like it was incomplete. The project had unexpectedly grown from an ad-hoc series of essays into an ebook. As soon as we released it, we had a bunch of ideas for things to add, change, and remove. We believed there was lots of room for improvement to realize the project’s full potential.

We’re excited that MIT Press agreed, and now we’re working on a revised and expanded version of the book. We’re adding dozens of new essays, revising every essay we previously published, and using a new theoretical and structural foundation meant to support a more coherent, unified whole.

Social media is transforming the world, yet our understanding of it remains shallow and narrow. This project aims to deepen and broaden our understanding of what social media is, and could be, through rigorous, accessible analysis that illuminates key patterns of social media. 

We take inspiration from field guides focused on the natural world that aim to help readers better identify and understand wildlife. However, instead of birds or insects, our taxonomy focuses on social media logics. We use “logic” not in the sense of formal or symbolic logic, but as a term for underlying structures, patterns, and forces. 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on a daily or weekly basis, ensuring that a field guide focused on individual platforms would be almost immediately out of date.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.

We also take inspiration from the tradition of “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.” Similarly, we hope our collection of social media logics will outline key patterns of social media that are likely to be relevant decades from now.

It is important for us to disclaim—early and often—that this guide is far from comprehensive. Not only are there logics we have not written about, there are logics we have not been smart enough to discern. The lines we’ve drawn are not definitive.

Nevertheless, we believe this project can contribute to a greater understanding of the digital public sphere. In particular, a sense that social media is vastly more complex and diverse than we often conceive of it. We believe that having a too-limited understanding of what social media is leads us to a too-limited vision of what social media can be. There is a diverse space of possibilities for social media, much of it outside the current status quo, and we believe it is there that the key to a different future lies. As Ruha Benjamin puts it, “imagination is a battleground.” Currently, we are living in the imagination of a handful of Silicon Valley companies and executives. To break out of it, we will have to imagine something different. We hope this project will be a valuable contribution to the reimagining process.

In the coming months, we will publish new logics through this newsletter, along with new essays outlining the book’s theoretical foundations. We hope you will follow along and help us develop our ideas.