Boundaryless Twitter Use: On the Affordances of Social Media

Abstract

For this study, we followed the director general (DG) of a large Swedish public authority on Twitter. We analyzed the data from Twitter and from interviews in terms of four affordances that distinguish social media from more traditional technologies: visibility, persistence, association and editability. We suggest that to understand social media affordances, it is necessary to consider the medium and the situation it creates and how this increases the range of possible interpretations. Therefore, we propose counterparts to the affordances of visibility, persistence, association and editability, in the form of invisibility, fluidity, dissociation and indeterminacy, to be included in an analysis of social media affordances and, as we argue, the creation of a persona through Twitter communication.

Autistic sociality on Twitter: Enacted affordances and affiliation strategies

“…Twitter affords visibility by relaying information about and from the users and making them available first to followers, and potentially to the followers’ followers. Twitter users with many followers, and particularly more followers than the number of followed accounts, are often considered more influential (Siegert et al, 2020; Zappavigna, 2018). Our sample included only three participants (T2, T4, TF2) whose follower count had at least 100 people more than their following count.…”

“…Visibility can also be enhanced by the option of retweeting when followers retweet to their own networks or 39) TF14 ( 58) TF15 ( 46) TF16 ( 57) TF22 ( 26) TF24 ( 28) TF23 ( 45) TF25 (41) like tweets. Most of our participants' tweets were not frequently retweeted -following Siegert et al (2020) we use 30 as a number of high count. There are seven instances of high retweets for participants -659 (TF17), 260 (T2), 197 (T2), 115 (T2), 69 (T2), 50 (TF17), 35 (TF17) and 39 broadcast tweets attracted high like count (>30) including jokes and discussion of such topics as mask wearing, politics, Twitter policy, and autism awareness.…”

Why time flies? The role of immersion in short video usage behavior

“…From the perspective of cognitive psychology, novel items are recognized more easily than familiar ones (Tulving and Kroll, 1995). The synthetic offerings of digital media are considered to be fluid and indeterminate processes of meaning creation, which are different from the enabling and constraining outcomes of inherently positive affordances (Siegert et al, 2020). In the current research, the characteristics of short video applications, such as vertical presentation and unique interfaces, can be seen as being novel and preventing attention from being diverted away from the application (Agrawal et al, 2020).…”

Research Progress and Trends in Technology Affordances Research: A Knowledge Graph Analysis Based on CiteSpace

“…Huang and Luo [14] point out that the concept of affordances, born in perceptual psychology, provides an important cognitive perspective for understanding the relationship between technology and people, emphasizing the relational properties, especially complementarity, between animal/human and environment/technology. Steffi et al [15] analyze data from Twitter and points out that in order to understand the affordances of social media, it is necessary to consider the media and the context it creates contexts and how this increases the range of possible explanations. Baym and Boyd [16] argue that the nature of online public space based on technological availability is shaped by the technical architecture and technological devices of social media platforms, but is also profoundly influenced by the social backgrounds, social identities, and social practices of social media users themselves.…”