Media Logic

This entry offers a review of works in communication studies. It discusses the theoretical debate and empirical research that have contributed to define, highlight, and expand the concept of “media logic.” The concept is grounded in the media sociology perspective, but it acquires an interdisciplinary nature from its numerous applications in different domains. Media logic is connected both with the ideas of production of media content and with the area of media effects. From the production perspective, the concept leans on the sociology of journalism, and particularly on studies of newsmaking. In this sense, media logic consists predominantly of a formatting logic that determines the classification of materials, the choice of mode of presentation, and the selection of social experience. When David Altheide and Robert Snow—in Altheide and Snow 1979 and Altheide and Snow 1991 (both cited under Core Texts)—worked out the concept of media logic, they pointed at the formats, the processes by which media produce their content. The “media logic” refers to the organizational, technological, and aesthetic determinants of media functioning, including the ways in which they allocate material and symbolic resources and work through formal and informal rules. If media logic refers to the processes for constructing messages within a particular medium, “format” becomes a key term because it refers to the rules and codes for defining, selecting, and presenting media content. From the perspective of media effects, the concept also envisions the impact media have on institutions. One popular theoretical development of the media logic approach is the concept of “mediatization” of society. The media logic is seen as the ‘engine’ of the processes of mediatization. Mediatization is then the result of the influence of mass communication on society, where many societal institutions, politics especially (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999, cited under Journal Articles on Mediatization of Politics), adapt themselves, their aims, their statutes, their conducts, and their logics to typical production formats and imperatives, mainly of a commercial nature, of modern communications. Schulz 2004 (cited under Mediatization) explains such processes in terms of “extension, substitution, amalgamation and accommodation.” However, the establishment of digital media environments prompts scholarly reflection on developing new theoretical perspectives, looking beyond traditional ‘formats’ (Klinger and Svensson 2015, cited under Digital Media Logic).