· 2017· Book chapter
The Affordances of Social MediaPlatforms
- 950citations
- 2017year
Short summary
This chapter proposes a platform-sensitive approach to analyzing social media affordances, drawing on diverse disciplinary conceptualizations to understand user-technology relations.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Affordance is a key concept for analyzing social media interfaces and user-technology relations.
- The concept of affordance has evolved across psychology, design, sociology, and communication studies.
- Recent scholarship has renewed debates on affordances in social media analysis.
- A platform-sensitive approach is proposed as an analytical tool for social media affordances.
- Changes to the Twitter platform are used as an example to illustrate this approach.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This chapter reflects on the concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users. In outlining its specific intellectual trajectory from psychology, to technology and design studies, sociology, and communication and media studies, our intention is to focus on some of the many–and sometimes conflicting–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and operationalized across various disciplinary boundaries. Following the renewed debates over affordances in recent scholarship on social, we address some of the new directions in which media and communication scholars have proposed to define and analytically deploy the concept. We first describe five different–but related–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and subsequently address how it has been employed to analyse social media in particular. We then outline a platform-sensitive approach to affordance as an analytical tool for examining social media based on recent examples of changes to the Twitter platform.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2017 · DOI ↗
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Field: Communication
CommunicationSocial Sciences