Affordances-in-practice: An ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse

Abstract

Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform's architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice.

Digital Work Practices: Affordances in Design Education

“…Drawing on the concept of affordances‐in‐practice (Costa ), we have approached digital capabilities in design education with a consideration of design practice, rather than with an attachment to teaching specific tools that may have different uses to those intended by their creators, and that may become obsolete over the duration of a student's degree program. Our aim is to shift the focus from analysing the architecture and features of specific technologies and towards ‘practices of usage within situated environments’ (Costa , 3). As there was not project scope to explore all the possible employment contexts of graduates, this article deals with the situated environments of design workplaces in Sydney.…”

“…Drawing on the concept of affordances-in-practice (Costa 2018), we have approached digital capabilities in design education with a consideration of design practice, rather than with an attachment to teaching specific tools that may have Adaptive capabilitiesStorytelling:Tell the right stories to the right audiences; bring histories and futures into stories about the present; use complex language to tell stories in multisensory ways; translate and adapt transmedia storytelling; make worlds and ecologies of stories; shape futures using stories of future scenarios; work with generative systems, AI and machine learning to tell stories, developing new tools and platforms (or new uses) to tell and disseminate stories.Presentation:Synthesise the tonal needs of different contexts and show how different exchanges matter in the context of a bigger picture (e.g. pitching a part of a bigger project); present experience to audiences, and explore multiple potential outcomes (using clickable prototypes or virtual reality).…”

Careful Co-presence: The Transnational Mediation of Emotional Intimacy

“…This relates to debates about the concept of "context collapse" (Marwick & boyd, 2011), in which some have influentially argued that the collapse of different social contexts onto one another is a platform affordance of social media, one which is consequently limited through active measures for "strategic audience management" (p. 128). However, in her study of Facebook in the medium-sized Turkish border city of Mardin, Costa argues from a digital anthropological perspective that an affordance is not a mere property of a platform, but only becomes apparent through media usage in various different social and cultural settings (Costa, 2018). She builds this on her finding that the idea of context collapse fails to account for how her Turkish respondents use Facebook, namely, consistently utilizing complex privacy settings to reproduce local social norms of keeping various social circles separate from one another.…”

From field sites to field events

“…Specifically, the type of ICTs participating in each field event influenced the kind and quality of data we were able to obtain. As STS and media scholars have shown, there is no such thing as a universal technology, but rather many different technologies with their specific characteristics and affordances (Pols 2016;Costa 2018). Digital and sensory anthropologists have discussed how ICT devices, media, and content shape embodied and sensory experience, and how this, in turn, influences the production of ethnographic knowledge (Pink et al 2015).3 Thus, the particular ICT device that is involved in co-creating a certain field event shapes ethnographers' and study participants' sensory perceptions.…”