Creative Commons CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). SI: Culture DigitallyFor this essay, we turn to one commonly used term in that literature that warrants significant reconsideration-if not reconstruction-affordance. A widely used keyword for communication technology studies, affordance nevertheless lacks a clear definition in the communication and media studies literature. We will argue that communication scholars have misappropriated an outdated definition of affordance from psychology that neither fits with how the term is used in that discipline nor helps communication scholars advance theory of our own. Emerging approaches to materiality within communication, attention to affect and emotion, and renewed interest in the processes of mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced notion of technological affordance than the communication field currently uses. When scholars use "affordances and constraints" to describe the qualities of communication technologies and media, they tap into concepts rooted in a history of scholarly conversations. However, we would argue the phrase now fails to capture the complexity of the interactive production of the stuff of communication and the richness of the emerging new scholarship that gives serious attention to the materiality, affect, and media on which communication are built.As a corrective, we propose the concept imagined affordance. We mean imagined affordance in three distinct ways. First, communication scholars have imagined a consensus or clarity around the term "affordance," which lacks in reality a clear definition within the communication literature. Second, imagined affordance evokes the imagination of both users and designers-expectations for technology that are not fully realized in conscious, rational knowledge but are nonetheless concretized or materialized in socio-technical systems. Affordances are, we argue, in large part imagined by users, a meaning of affordance that we get from psychology that has 603385S MSXXX10.1177/2056305115603385Social Media + SocietyNagy and Neff AbstractIn this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication-affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and other such "smart" innovations. Within technology studies, emerging theories of materiality, affect, and mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced d...

This article compares the work of fashion models and 'new media workers' (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participantobservation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are drawn to the autonomy, creativity and excitement that jobs in these media industries can provide, they have also come to accept as normal the high risks associated with this work. Diffused through media images, this normalization of risk serves as a model for how workers in other industries should behave under flexible employment conditions. Using interview data from within the fashion media and the dot-com world, we discuss eight forces that give rise to the phenomenon of entrepreneurial labor: 1) the cultural quality of cool, 2) creativity, 3) autonomy, 4) selfinvestment, 5) compulsory networking, 6) portfolio evaluations, 7) international competition, and 8) foreshortened careers. We also provide a model of what constitutes the hierarchy of 'good work' in cultural industries, and we conclude with implications of what entrepreneurial labor means for theories of work. 1 Media industries, in part influenced by the unpredictable audience reception of their products, have long dealt with the problem of how to stimulate creativity in the face of organizational and industrial uncertainty (Hirsch 1972, Caves 2002, Biebly and Biebly 1994, Peterson and Anand 2004). One way that media industries negotiate the dual pressures of innovation and uncertainty is through changing workplace norms. Indeed, one of the first and most important scholarly studies of flexibility in the workplace traces shifts in employment relations in the film industry from the relatively stable days of the studio system to the present flexible organization of jobs and contractors (Christopherson and Storper 1989). Since the 1970s, there has also been a more general trend in the post-industrial economy toward greater employment insecurity. 'Nonstandard employment,' or work outside of a fulltime, permanent arrangement, is on the rise across all economic sectors in the United States (Kalleberg et al 2000) as well as in other regions. Practices ranging from firing then rehiring employees as independent contractors (Treaster 2001) to retaining 'permatemps' within fastgrowing industries (Smith 2001) and demanding that employees 'keep up' with new skills on their own time (Kotamraju 2002), press workers to accept more risk and greater responsibility. Understandably, adapting to these demands has altered individuals' attachment to work and their sense of self (Beck 1992; Beck 2000; Sennett 1999; Smith 2001). This article looks at two distinct groups of workers in the contemporary media industries-fashion models and 'new media workers' or those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet-to trace the processes b...

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others. Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

Proponents claim that the adoption of building information modeling ͑BIM͒ will lead to greater efficiencies through increased collaboration. In this paper, we present research that examines the use of BIM technologies for mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire life safety systems ͑often referred to as MEP͒ coordination and how the introduction of BIM influences collaboration and communication. Using data from over 12 months of ethnographic observations of the MEP coordination process for two commercial construction projects and interviews with 65 industry leaders across the United States, we find that BIM-enabled projects are often tightly coupled technologically, but divided organizationally. This means that while BIM makes visible the connections among project members, it is not fostering closer collaboration across different companies. We outline the competing obligations to scope, project, and company as one cause for this division. Obligations to an individual scope of work or to a particular company can conflict with project goals. Individual leadership, especially that of the MEP coordinator in the teams we studied, often substitutes for stronger project cohesion and organization. Organizational forces and structures must be accounted for in order for BIM to be implemented successfully.

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