Boundaryless Twitter Use: On the Affordances of Social Media

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 editabil...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Steffi Siegert, Mikael Holmgren Caicedo, Maria Mårtensson Hansson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
Series:Social Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/9/11/201
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2076-0760