Normative Interfaces: Affordances, Gender, and Race in Facebook

Abstract

With each new technological advancement comes a declaration of some "great social equalizer" (boyd, 2014). When the Internet was first entering households, a common belief was that its integration would bring a cultural and social shift. These sentiments were guided by the idea that virtual communities allowed users to leave their bodies behind; users met new people and experimented with their identities (Rheingold, 1996; Turkle, 1995). Prejudices were assumed to soon be a thing of the past-race, gender, and physical appearances would no longer be delineating factors. Today, these utopian visions are criticized for their optimism. It seems that technologies cannot solve social issues and perhaps even work to emphasize social divisions (boyd, 2014). The prejudices that we learn offline are likely to journey with us into digital spaces. Although Facebook, for example, allows users to connect to people in new ways, it also reinforces existing networks and norms transferred from offline spaces. In other words, Facebook relationships are "anchored" and compel users to value anonymous (Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin, 2008), and perhaps even anti-anonymous (Cirucci, 2015), identifications over anonymous ones. The goal of this study is to better comprehend, as they relate to race and gender, social network site affordances and related interpretations of gender and race identities. Employing Facebook as a case study, I seek to develop answers to questions such as: How familiar are users with Facebook's tools and functionalities? How are issues of gender and race represented through Facebook? and How do users conceive of gender and race? Affordances The use of "affordance" as a noun was coined by Gibson in his 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Writing about animals and their biological environments, Gibson uses his theory of affordances to explain that, to really understand where and how animals live, we must comprehend how animals visually perceive of what their environments offer them: I mean it by something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way no existing term does. It implies the 717905S MSXXX10.

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