Degrees of Freedom: Exploring Agency, Narratives, and Technological Affordances in the #TakeAKnee Controversy

Abstract

Being American is what brings US all together. Not the things that divides US." This is one of the many tweets that addressed the #TakeAKnee controversy that erupted in September 2017. The controversy started when, on 23 September, president Trump took to Twitter to critique National Football League (NFL) players such as Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem. This tweet prompted multiple football players to follow Kaepernick's example and led to an overwhelming social media response debating the movement and the values attached to the national anthem and the flag. What it means to be American has been the center of much debate. Even though one cannot speak of a single "true" American identity, research has identified several values that form the foundation of American national identity: Liberty, equality, unity in diversity, as well as symbols such as the flag (Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux, & Garland, 2004; Kemmelmeier & Winter, 2008). As with any collective or individual identity, US national identity is a construction, and people actively contribute to what it means to be an American through public expressions and interactions (Hutcheson et al., 2004). With the advent of social media, this construction has become more democratic and inclusive, as evidenced by the #TakeAKnee debate, where the hashtag was used to elaborate on social media users' understanding of Americanness.

The Voice of Silence: Patterns of Digital Participation Among Palestinian Women in East Jerusalem

“…Nonetheless, the same affordance that potentially renders Facebook for political expression may also pose challenges, as expressing political views may result in polarised debate and damaged relationships with friends or family (Gearhart & Zhang, 2015;John & Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015;Mor et al, 2015). Zuckerman (2014) suggests looking at online participation as a continuum as individuals switch between modes of participation throughout the day according to the user's political circumstances, conditions, and social structure (Fuchs, 2014;Pearce et al, 2014;Rosenbaum, 2019). An "extreme" decision is that of disconnectivity (Light, 2014) based on a social critique of media use known as "media refusal" (Portwood-Stacer, 2013).…”

I Refused to Say #MeToo: Negotiating Between Individual Agency and ‘Imagined’ Platform Constraints

“…Throughout the social media scholarship, affordances as a term have been discussed as ‘platform affordances’, where the above-mentioned studies deploy affordances as a term to understand relations between platform infrastructure and actions of its users (Bucher & Helmond, 2018). The negotiations between platform affordances and exercised individual agency have become an important point of discussion (Hitlin & Johnson, 2015; Rosenbaum, 2019).…”

“…It shifts our focus towards the understanding of what human agents can imagine technology to do for them in terms of ‘imagined platform affordances’ (Davis & Chouinard, 2016; Nagy & Neff, 2015). Although it is also important to focus on what do the users of these platforms think in terms of what they cannot do with the social media in their hands, as it can result into the constrained agency of the platform users (Rosenbaum, 2019), this dimension helps in enriching the theoretical explanations of how people imagine constraints of the platform and how it could curtail the behaviour of an individual, resulting in the restricted or constrained agency.…”

A Link Communities Analysis of the UK Instagram Covid-19 Searchable Metadiscourse

“…Jaramillo-Dent and Pérez-Rodríguez demonstrate how the border wall proposed for the US-Mexico border has become a central component of hashtagged narratives related to immigration, undermining the voice of the migrant. Rosenbaum's [8] analysis shows that Instagram posts and tweets marked by #TakeAKnee, #TakeTheKnee and #TakeAKneeNFL that emerged in response to American Football player Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem reflect the construction of American identity.…”

“…Empirical studies that examine a few distinct hashtags attached to a specific issue are common in social media research (e.g., [7,8]). Focusing on utterances made within specific hashtag frames (in other words, posts that contain a given hashtag) allows analysis of content within those frames, but results in a lack of emphasis on the fact that social media posts are usually marked by a multitude of hashtags.…”