Abstract
For this study, we followed the director general (DG) of a large Swedish public authority on Twitter. We analyzed the data from Twitter and from interviews in terms of four affordances that distinguish social media from more traditional technologies: visibility, persistence, association and editability. We suggest that to understand social media affordances, it is necessary to consider the medium and the situation it creates and how this increases the range of possible interpretations. Therefore, we propose counterparts to the affordances of visibility, persistence, association and editability, in the form of invisibility, fluidity, dissociation and indeterminacy, to be included in an analysis of social media affordances and, as we argue, the creation of a persona through Twitter communication.
Highlights
Social media, such as Twitter, promise symmetric, two-way communication between organizations and their stakeholders (Etter 2014) by enabling more interactive and personalized communication, heightened intensity (Kelleher and Miller 2006), and few gatekeeping mechanisms.Organizations can converse with stakeholders who ask questions and voice concerns (Greenberg 2010) and even address issues relating to trustworthiness (Coyle et al 2012)
While we agree with previous research that it is important to study the constraining aspects of social media technologies, and that the affordance perspective contributes to this cause, we find that the social media affordances identified in the literature tend to privilege presence over absence
We focus on the Twitter behavior of the Director General (DG) in terms of the affordances of visibility, association, persistence and editability
Summary
Most research on social media underplays the way it enables and restricts communication and the role it plays in the constitution of identity. The affordances approach posits, for example, that social media afford opportunities for action and moves the focus away from the functional aspects of how technology is shaped. Instead, it emphasizes the role of technology in shaping social interaction, i.e., how social media technologies enable and constrain communication (Boyd 2010; Fayard and Weeks 2007; Gibson 1979; Treem and Leonardi 2012).
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