Please join us at the CIS 720 Seminar today — Monday, January 25 (4:30p-5:30p HST) for our own Yinan Sun’s talk on “Cultural Affordances and Social Media”.
Title: Cultural Affordances and Social Media
Abstract:
This paper first reviews the development and application of affordances theory in the field of social media studies. Then, it examines the significance and limitations of the original meaning of affordances of the environment that is provided by American psychologist James Gibson. The paper argues that the cultural aspect of affordances has been understated and should be included as part of affordances theory. To enrich the theoretical understanding of affordances and further facilitate the empirical studies of social media affordances, the paper offers a novel definition of cultural affordances that bridges cultural studies and social media studies. The new definition of cultural affordances includes two layers, which are cultural affordances of technology and affordances of the cultural. Later, the paper provides examples to showcase how this novel definition can be applied in prior empirical studies with a focus on WeChat.
Bio:
Yinan Sun is a third-year doctoral student in the CIS program. Her research interests center around the broad area of social informatics, specifically cultural affordances, cultural identities and fake news. Her focus is on identifying how social media and culture/context influence people’s perception as well as behavior.