Media logic as a tool in communicative analysis

In this article the author follows the history of the concept of media logic from 1979 (Altheide, Snow) via contributions to the field of Schultz, Krotz, Hjarvard and other researchers to the recent article of J. van Dijk and T. Poell devoted to the re-conceptualisation of media logic in the age of social media. Researchers described media logic as an inner motivation of mass-media actors. The specific of media logic is related to the mediatisation expansion to different fields of contemporary social life. This expansion makes non-media institutions dependent on the same factors as mass-media actors. In the pre-Internet period of mass-media (mostly TV), media logic was established, for example, in preferring a politician-actor rather than an experienced, or well-educated, or charismatic actors as a mediagenic person. The maxim "what was not shown on TV in politics never existed" became common place for political technologists. But several decades later a new logic replaced the previous one: social media logic. Mass-media themselves have changed radically. Their position in the public sphere has become more vague and uncertain than before. In these new conditions media logic has also changed. It now includes survival strategies in the competitor field with heterogenic actors and powers. In this article the author makes assumptions by extending and depicting the Dijk and Poell four-factor description of social media logic (programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication): the communication field (being under social media logic) can be characterised by three qualities: egalitarism, phatics, co-dependence. By accepting these characteristics, a researcher can find a key to the explanations of cultural processes in the communicative field. Egalitarism makes all actors equal to each other and blurs the hierarchy between professional and non-professional actors. Collective actors are personified. Phatic communication, described by B. Malinowsky, expands enormously and determines the logic of development not only of media-actors but of many different non-media institutions. And co-dependence of communicants can be explained in terms of "likes"-economy and "likes"-connectivity. All these features can be considered as media logic itself. The analysis of these factors can be helpful in media research.

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