Ethical implications of affordance change in contemporary social media platforms

Abstract

The article at hand investigates how changes and additions in affordances across online social networks (OSNs) over the past five years have increasingly framed communicative practices in terms of “attention economies” (Harsin, 2015), inherent competition and the “neoliberal self” (McGuigan, 2014) without presenting viable alternatives. Online social interaction is undergoing constant change: gamification schemes such as Snapstreaks become increasingly explicit, platforms offload features aimed at specific audiences into companion apps like Viber Wink and startups like Bux use social features to turn activities like stock-trading into quasi-communicative activities, thereby becoming specialized OSNs in their own right. Further, the article aims to show how affordance changes in OSNs can a) propagate notions of the neoliberal self, b) constrain the users’ means of self-expression, and c) blur the boundaries between OSNs themselves and between online social interaction and other platforms, e.g. dedicated to activities like writing or stock trading. For that purpose, a diachronic affordance analysis is conducted to investigate how social media platforms reframe communicative practices over time, using an updated technological determinism framework (de la Cruz Paragas & Lin, 2016). Social media affordances have been researched in terms of how they affect knowledge sharing (Majchrzak et al., 2013) or political expression (Halpern & Gibbs, 2013). However, these critical uses of affordances to analyze software (Curinga, 2014) only investigate their case at one point in time. Yet, social media startups are characterized by constant ‘tweaking’ (Bogost, 2016) and shifting alliances (e.g. between Spotify and Tinder or Twitter and Stripe) and these ‘evolutionary’ dynamics have not been systematically reflected. Rather than looking holistically at one service, the analysis pursues a novel comparative approach, focusing on patterns of affordance change over time, according to patterns such as the ambivalence of online metrics, the relationship between playfulness and control (e.g. Gekker, 2016), and notions of self-branding, which have been discussed in cases where personal identity and entrepreneurial activity overlap (e.g. Duffy & Hund, 2015) but not in everyday communication. This comparative approach demonstrates the ethical challenges that the synchronized development of social media affordances across platforms poses, making it difficult for users to become literate in the mechanics of “social media logic” (Poell & Van Dijck, 2013).