What does Facebook ‘afford’ do-it-yourself musicians? Considering social media affordances as sites of contestation

Abstract

Recent theoretical work by Internet and social media scholars promises to offer valuable clarity to a concept which has been historically rather muddy: the affordance. Connections and shared themes within this recent literature have been thus far rather under-developed, and therefore the first contribution of this article is to strengthen those connections. It argues for a nascent conceptualisation of affordances as ‘sites of contestation’, improving on unsatisfactory applications of affordance theory to date by focusing on the specificity of user-groups, on social media’s status as both textual and material, and on power imbalances between users and platforms. The second contribution of this article is an empirical application of this analytical tool. Drawing on ethnographic work in a do-it-yourself (‘DIY’) music scene in Leeds, it considers what is ‘afforded’ to these practitioners by the Facebook Pages platform. Three key affordances are outlined – ‘digging’, ‘rallying’ and ‘surveilling’ – which shed light on the complexity and variety of contestations enacted between platforms and users.

‘Not the Real Me’: Social Imaginaries of Personal Data Profiling

“…In focusing on the dynamic and emergent nature of human-data assemblages, this approach recognises the possibilities of a wide variety of response by people to the social imaginaries about personal datafication and dataveillance that are publicly articulated, including potential refusal or resistance to them. It also recognises the interplays of the discursive and the material when social imaginaries are enacted as part of practices of embodiment and identities, and positions technological affordances as ‘sites of contestation’ (Jones, 2020).…”

“…Imaginaries are positioned as contributing to and part of affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities and the ways in which technological affordances come together with human bodily affordances. In media studies, affordances are defined as the ways in which the design of the technologies offer and shape specific uses (Jones, 2020; Nagy and Neff, 2015). The theory on affordances, however, often fails to recognise the complexities of the relational dimensions that humans have with digital technologies (Jones, 2020).…”

“…In media studies, affordances are defined as the ways in which the design of the technologies offer and shape specific uses (Jones, 2020; Nagy and Neff, 2015). The theory on affordances, however, often fails to recognise the complexities of the relational dimensions that humans have with digital technologies (Jones, 2020). Vital materialism theory as applied to digital media and devices emphasises embodied, affective and relational aspects of the assemblages of humans and nonhumans that gather.…”

The emergence of promotional gatekeeping and converged local music professionals on social media

“…The creative use of these features introduces the central affordances identified in this article—multiplication and convergence of roles—that enable promotional gatekeeping. While the Facebook pages (Jones, 2020) or profiles (boyd, 2011; Ellison and Vitak, 2015) have received specialized treatment in the framework of affordances, this study views “Facebook as a toolkit” (Smock et al, 2011) by detailing on the combination of features that were seen by music entrepreneurs as most essential for their promotional work.…”

“…In the context of social media, on the one hand, the potentials such as visibility, anonymity, persistence, replicability, scalability, or searchability are widely understood as affordances (boyd, 2011;Evans et al, 2017). On the other hand, and in the context of music, specifically, Facebook has been found to afford the do-it-yourself musicians actions such as digging, rallying, and surveilling (Jones, 2020). Evans et al (2017) have argued for the conceptual differentiation of features, affordances, and outcomes; affordances, therefore, are neither features nor outcomes.…”