Engagement might take many forms—a like, a retweet, a view, a share, a comment, a post—and these forms needed to be, on the one hand, flexible enough to accommodate a satisfying range of expression—for social media to work, it must feel genuinely social—but structured enough to be easily interpretable by software. As the theorist Philip E. Agre once observed, computers must impose a “grammar” on human activity to make it intelligible, just as the grammar of the English language makes it intelligible to its speakers.
A grammar is not a straitjacket, however; it is a remarkably supple thing. “Just as the speakers of English can produce a potentially infinite variety of grammatical sentences from the finite means of English vocabulary and grammar,” Agre writes, “people engaged in captured activity can engage in an infinite variety of sequences of action, provided these sequences are composed of the unitary elements and means of combination prescribed by the grammar of action.” In other words, one of the virtues of a grammar is the sense of freedom it allows. This sense of freedom helps explain why people find social media pleasurable. Even as their interactions are being subtly (or unsubtly) structured by the design of the user interface and the code underneath, they enjoy a feeling of autonomy, a feeling of being free to express themselves.
Ben Tarnoff, Internet for the People pg 136-137
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