Journal articles on the topic 'Digital affordances'

This article aims to theorize digitally disconnected travel experiences by investigating various emotional responses during the process of withdrawal and regain of technological affordances. The theoretical concepts of affordance and emotional episodes were adopted in this study to create a conceptual framework. Fifteen diaries and 18 interviews were collected from 24 participants’ reflections of their disconnected experiences. This study thus contributes a contextual update of emotional episodes by providing a detailed account of various emotions in the entire disconnecting/reconnecting travel experience. Also, this study contributes to the affordance literature by exploring the fluidity of technology affordances and environmental affordances. This article develops the Disconnected Emotions Model (DEM), a theoretical framework to provide an understanding of the changing relationship between human emotions and material affordances.

AbstractVisualisation of ideas and emergent designs is an essential ingredient in design practice. Sketching and CAD represent two widely used visualisation tools, each with complementary affordances that dictate their typical use during the design process. Sketching has affordances of fast and fluent visualisation whereas CAD affords easy modification of detailed designs. This paper proposes a hybrid tool, Digital Sketch Modelling, investigating the extent to which it can deliver complementary affordances of both sketching to CAD. Analysis of diary entries made by 62 postgraduate designers using sketching, digital sketch modelling and CAD within a design project forms the basis of the study. Results illustrate how digital sketching over crude 3d digital models, combined with benefits of digital image editing software enhance affordance for easy visualisation of ideas. Concurrently, the level of software used in Digital Sketch modelling led to fewer concerns over the level of difficulty to modify designs, enhancing the affordance for easy modification. As such we conclude Digital Sketch Modelling does combine affordances indicating its potential benefit in use between sketching and CAD.

Purpose Serendipity is an interesting phenomenon to study in information science as it plays a fundamental – but perhaps underestimated – role in how we discover, explore, and learn in all fields of life. The purpose of this paper is to operationalize the concept of serendipity by providing terminological “building blocks” for understanding connections between environmental and personal factors in serendipitous encounters. Understanding these connections is essential when designing affordances in physical and digital environments that can facilitate serendipity. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, serendipity is defined as what happens when we, in unplanned ways, encounter resources (information, things, people, etc.) that we find interesting. In the outlined framework, serendipity is understood as an affordance, i.e., a usage potential when environmental and personal factors correspond with each other. The framework introduces three key affordances for facilitating serendipity: diversifiability, traversability, and sensoriability, covering capacities of physical and digital environments to be diversified, traversed, and sensed. The framework is structured around couplings between the three key affordances and three key personal serendipity factors: curiosity, mobility, and sensitivity. Ten sub-affordances for serendipity and ten coupled personal sub-factors are also briefly outlined. Related research is compared with and mapped into the framework aiming at a theoretical validation. The affordance approach to serendipity is discussed, including different degrees and types of serendipity. Findings All the terminological “building blocks” in the framework are seen to resonate with the included related research. Serendipity is found to be a commonplace phenomenon in everyday life. It is argued that we cannot “engineer” nor “design” serendipity per se, but can design affordances for serendipity. Serendipity may thus be intended by designers, but must always be unplanned by users. The outlined affordance approach to serendipity points to the importance of our sensory-motor abilities to discover and explore serendipitous affordances. Research limitations/implications Implications of the framework for designing physical and digital environments with affordances for serendipity are briefly considered. It is suggested that physical environments may have a primacy regarding affordances of sensoriability for facilitating serendipity, and digital environments a primacy regarding traversability, whereas physical and digital environments may afford similar degrees of diversifiability. In future research, the framework needs further empirical validation in physical and digital environments. Originality/value No other research has been found addressing affordances for serendipity and connections between environmental and personal factors in similarly detailed ways. The outlined framework and typology may function as a baseline for further serendipity studies.

The goal of this study is to illustrate the affordances mediated by digital socio-literacy practices of university-level EFL learners engaging in collaborative reading of texts from an ecological perspective. For this purpose, a total of 38 first-year undergraduate students taking a compulsory EFL course in Turkey participated in the research. Data collected from learners' digital annotations on a digital annotation tool (DAT) and reflective papers were qualitatively analyzed. As a result, the construct of affordance was operationalized in an EFL digital social reading context through indicators derived from learners' annotations. The findings based on student-reported data showed that digital collaborative reading practices had contextual, social, and linguistic affordances for EFL learners. Following the discussion of the findings, the study invites future research to examine L2 learners' practices in a DAT-mediated environment in relation to affordances for specific language areas such as grammar and writing.

PurposeThis study takes an affordance approach to explain how users perceive the affordance of user action within blockchain and examines how it influences the subsequent user experience. Focusing on the effect of trust on cognitive processes, the authors analyze how affordances in blockchains affect the user experience.Design/methodology/approachThe blockchain affordances are examined through a two-stage process. The authors employ a qualitative analysis based on insights gained from the current literature and interviews. The authors then apply a quantitative survey to examine the role of trust in interactions with blockchain services. A structural user model was tested in which their appreciation of affordances of blockchain predicted the trust and satisfaction.FindingsUsers' appreciation for transparency and reliability explained to what extent they trust and are satisfied, thereby suggesting the heuristic roles of trust in blockchains. The study findings indicate a heuristic role for trust regarding underlying links to technological and affective affordances. A user's cognitive heuristics affect their attitudes toward blockchain, in which technological features are processed through users' perceptions and experience.Research limitations/implicationsThe model contributes to the conceptualization of security, privacy and traceability along with trust, which is then linked to transparency and reliability. The findings show how the frame of affordances gains explanatory power by being linked to the concepts of affect and emotion. The heuristics of direct perception of security–traceability–privacy (STP) can be used to understand the trajectory of heuristics and ongoing choices of blockchain.Practical implicationsThe study results offer a lens through which to address the technology's most common problems by pairing user experience principles and heuristics to blockchain technologies. This study offers insights into the understanding of user actions related to blockchains and into practical implications for developing trust-based services. The results guide the application and tailoring of motivational affordances in blockchain.Originality/valueWhile blockchain technology has gained popularity and momentum, there has been little research on how specific features of blockchain technology create value. This study contributes to the research gap by highlighting the role and dimension of trust in relation to STP in blockchains and provides meaningful implications for theory and practice.

(1) Background: Digital health research has indicated that people with stigmatized health problems are drawn to online support groups (OSGs) because these groups help them to manage such conditions. However, little is known about how media affordances—interactions between the technology and the user—reconfigure the ways in which stigmatized individuals use OSGs and interact with others like themselves. (2) Method: The current study applied an affordance framework to evaluate how Facebook and WhatsApp support groups can help military veterans and their partners cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and was based on interviews with 34 PTSD-OSG members in Israel. (3) Findings: This research identified five affordances that members appraised as enhancing their coping efforts in the digital world: visibility, availability, multimediality, surveillance, and synchronicity. (4) Conclusions: This study reveals the connection between a specific stigmatized mental health disorder (i.e., PTSD) and perceptions of communication technologies (i.e., affordances), and specifies the uses of technologies for coping with this mental health disorder. Moreover, this study may inform digital intervention designers about which communication affordances can potentially lead to better health outcomes.

Modern technology is transforming in an accelerating rate our physical, economic, cultural and educational environments. The new generation of learners, both adults and students of all ages, is surrounded by a multitude of technological tools, and these tools (computers, robots, software, internet etc.) are used ubiquitously not only in learning environments, but in daily life as well. Today’s children are furthermore characterized as “digital natives” and are clearly distinguished from their teachers and adults who constitute the generation of “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2001). Visual programming languages, specifically designed for young learners, provide additional programming tools that are integrated in robotics education as well, while additional advances provide support to the idea of following the STEM (Science, Technology and Engineering and Mathematics) approach.

Abstract This paper extends Pentland and Feldman’s (2007) narrative network method and uses it to more clearly understand how new technology affordances and digital spaces impact storytelling and enactment during and immediately after a crisis. To do this, I (a) examine the meaningful roles human motivation and feelings play in online storytelling and enactment, and (b) analyze how context impacts storytelling and enactment, and therefore the construction of narrative networks. Specifically, I analyze a series of Facebook messages exchanged during a recent, very publicized campus crisis to reveal the nonlinear digital stories that are co-constructed online to keep others informed. I demonstrate how crisis-affected populations capitalize on the affordances offered by social media to enact stories, correct stories, and ultimately to aid in sensemaking and sense-giving after a crisis event. Implications of new technology affordances for creating and updating narratives throughout times of high uncertainty are provided.

For the last few decades, media theorists have been faced with the understanding that the networked digital computer is the meta-medium to end all mediums. This places researchers in the curious position where online platforms, such as YouTube, cannot legitimately and directly be contrasted with traditional analogue mediums, such as cinema and television. To address this inconsistency, I developed the theory of foundation technologies and their respective proto-affordances, which demonstrates the existence of past periods of ‘new media’. These were brought about by the introduction of key technologies that each offered, at the time, a new and unique underlying affordance to a society. Each new ‘proto-affordance’ inspired social disruption, as new specific mediums were spawned – each remediating existing mediums of similar mode. This framework shows digitality as another evolutionary step in a line of foundation technologies, which includes the artefact, the machine and electricity. The theory of foundation technologies permits software-based online platforms, such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Twitter, to be called digital mediums, and thus aids in understanding their technological substrate and unique affordances. Justifying this relation between old mediums and new, digital, ones equips us to more effectively comprehend and analyse these platforms as to their social adoption and uses, cultural practices, implications and effects. This allows us to better understand and control our present, and even guide our potential future.

Although overarching if not foundational conceptualizations of digital governance in the field of critical data studies aptly account for and explain subjection, calculated resistance is left conceptually unattended despite case studies that document instances of resistance. I ask at the outset why conceptualizations of digital governance are so bleak, and I argue that all are underscored implicitly by a Deleuzian theory of desire that overlooks agency, defined here in Foucauldian terms. I subsequently conceptualize digital governance as encompassing subjection as well as resistance, and I cast the two in relational perspective by making use of the concepts “affordance” and “assemblage” in conjunction with multiple subjectivities and Foucault's view of power as productive as well as his view of resistance as an “antagonism of strategies” in his late scholarship on resistance, ethics, and subjectivity. I offer examples of salient modes of what I call “productive” resistance (as opposed to resistance by way of avoidance, disruption or obfuscation), and from a Foucauldian perspective I explain how each mode targets and subverts technologies of repressive power to produce new elements of the digital environment and construct new truths. I conclude by recognizing the agency embodied in resistance as an end in itself, but I also consider that modes of productive resistance can have extrinsic value as they affect the fluid interaction among elements of the digital environment, potentially disrupting the presumed structure of dominance and dependence, and opening our conceptualization of algorithmic life to hopeful possibilities for change.

Informational environments needs to adopt mechanisms that make it possible to find information. Affordances are object/environments elements that shows the subjects action possibilities. The Intentionality consists of the subject’s experiences, competences, skills and knowledge related to environments and objects interaction. The research questioned how the studies of the Intentionality and affordance could contribute to the information findability on informational environments. It aims to understand the theoretically relationship between Intentionality and affordance concepts, and propose informational environments design and assessment recommendations from bibliographical and exploratory research using the quadripolar method. The results show the concepts effective dialogue and development of digital, analog or hybrid informational environments project and evaluation recommendations. It’s concluded that both theories can be reflected in the informational environment design as they contribute to information findability as well as that subject’s Intentionality influences the affordances detection process.

The objective of this study is to discuss affordances in foreign language (L2) teacher education in the digital age. With that aim, some pedagogical interventions were carried out in the course of “Supervised Internship” within the context of the Undergraduate Degree in English Language Teaching, at a federal university in the Southeast of Brazil in order to obtain empirical data concerning the perceptions of pre-service English teachers. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of affordance, in relation to the effects of globalization (and its Information and Communication Technologies - ICTs) on the education of language teachers in the digital age, considering aspects of interculturality, through hybrid approaches such as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) and the Intercomprehension approach. Data were obtained through participant observation and interviews with educators and pre-service teachers, and include: 1) discussion of texts about language teaching, interculturality and the use of technologies in education; 2) virtual meetings in COIL format with pre-service teachers enrolled in the course of “Supervised Internship” at a Brazilian university and at Alberto Hurtado University (AHU) in Chile; 3) discussion/reflection sessions; 4) interviews with participants. The analysis suggests that ICTs and approaches such as CLIL, COIL and Intercomprehension promote affordances for inclusive practices (for financially disadvantaged people, with the use of internet); multilingual practices (including other languages besides English); and intercultural practices, promoting contact and learning among different cultures and languages.ResumoO objetivo deste estudo é refletir sobre affordances na formação de professores de línguas adicionais (L2) na era digital. Com esse objetivo, algumas intervenções pedagógicas foram realizadas na disciplina de “Estágio Supervisionado” do curso de Licenciatura em Letras Inglês de uma universidade federal do Sudeste brasileiro, a fim de ilustrar e embasar essa reflexão por meio de dados empíricos das percepções de professores de inglês em formação. O arcabouço teórico se baseia na noção de affordance em relação aos efeitos da globalização com suas tecnologias de informação e comunicação (TICs) na formação de professores de L2 na era digital, com a ampliação da interculturalidade por meio de abordagens híbridas como a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) e Intercompreensão. Os dados foram gerados por meio de observação participante e entrevistas com os professores formadores e em formação, e incluem: 1) discussões de textos sobre ensino de idiomas, interculturalidade e uso de tecnologias na educação; 2) reuniões virtuais em formato COIL, com professores em formação, matriculados na disciplina de estágio supervisionado na universidade no Brasil e na Universidade Alberto Hurtado, no Chile; 3) sessões de reflexão; e 4) entrevistas com os participantes. A análise sugere que as TICs e abordagens como a CLIL, COIL e Intercompreensão propiciam affordances para uma prática mais inclusiva (alcançando pessoas desfavorecidas financeiramente por meio da internet); multilíngue (por meio da inclusão de outras línguas além do inglês); e intercultural, permitindo contato e aprendizado entre culturas e línguas diferentes.ResumenEl objetivo de este estudio es discutir las posibilidades en la educación de profesores de lenguas extranjeras (L2) en la era digital. Con ese objetivo, se llevaron a cabo algunas intervenciones pedagógicas en la asignatura de "Práctica Supervisada" de la carrera de Licenciatura en Inglés en una universidad federal en el sudeste de Brasil, con el fin de obtener datos empíricos sobre las percepciones de profesores de inglés en pre-servicio. El marco teórico se basa en el concepto de affordance, en relación con los efectos de la globalización (y sus Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación - TIC) en la educación de los profesores de idiomas en la era digital, considerando aspectos de la interculturalidad, a través de enfoques híbridos como CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) e de Intercomprensión. Los datos se obtuvieron a través de la observación participante y entrevistas con educadores y profesores en pre-servicio e incluyen: 1) discusión de textos sobre enseñanza de idiomas, interculturalidad y el uso de tecnologías en educación; 2) reuniones virtuales en formato COIL con maestros de pre-servicio inscritos en la carrera de la universidad brasileña y en la Universidad Alberto Hurtado (AHU) en Chile; 3) sesiones de discusión / reflexión; 4) entrevistas con los participantes. 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This article examines the specifics and perspectives of the information and communication universe theory for the analysis of the mass media. The aim is to explain the application of the concept of affordance in the context of media theory. The term was introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson to describe the specific inviting nature of objects and events, which, through affordances, suggest an algorithm for subsequent actions. From this point of view, the information and communication universe makes it possible to use it for some important purposes for the subjects of communication. However, the quality and options for implementing the possibilities of affordance depend on the goals, interests and skills of the subject who is trying to work with this affordance. To use an analogy, the same axe could invite some people to chop wood for an old lady, and others to use it as a weapon against her in order to seize her pension benefits. The thesis on the functional usefulness of the category information and communication universe for the analysis of processes in the media system is put forward. Traditional ideas about the specifics of the production and consumption of texts are corrected. The author analyzes the affordances of the Internet as a subsystem of the information and communication universe. It helps to explain the radical differences in the assessment of network digital technologies by representatives of different research schools. The article outlines further prospects for the identification and use of hidden affordances.

This article develops the concept of emotional affordances, which is first used to describe the capacities of heritage sites to enable, prompt and restrict particular emotional experiences of their visitors. Secondly, the article asks how the emotional affordances of digital media, particularly those taking effect in digital photography and social media practices, allow visitors to mediate the emotional affordances of a particular heritage site. The argument builds on an ethnographic study of visitors’ digital image practices at the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ in Berlin and it demonstrates how visitors ‘capture the feeling’ of the memorial through such practices while also reshaping the experiences the place affords.

Prensky (2001) afirma que a nova geração está habituada ao uso de tecnologias e a receber e assimilar informações rapidamente; são nomeados “nativos digitais”. A aprendizagem de língua inglesa nesse contexto digital tem se justificado, principalmente, pelo seu status de língua global e por ser um instrumento de comunicação entre diferentes culturas. Dessa maneira, propomos analisar o processo de aprendizagem de língua inglesa através da ferramenta online “Google Tradutor” por um nativo digital de uma escola municipal de Uberaba (MG). Para tal propósito, recorremos ao termo affordance (GIBSON, 1981), conceito utilizado na área de Linguística Aplicada, que diz respeito às diferentes formas como o indivíduo utiliza e percebe um ambiente. Sendo assim, acreditamos que os ambientes online são propícios para a efetivação de diferentes affordances. Além disso, Benson (1997) afirma que ambientes extraclasse (defendemos que isso inclui a internet) contribuem para a autonomia na aprendizagem. Através de questionários e de uma entrevista com um aprendiz de língua inglesa contendo relatos de experiências com o uso dessa ferramenta, concluímos que ele percebe e efetiva diferentes affordances por meio do “Google Tradutor”. Ainda, percebemos que esse aprendiz, foco do estudo, não constitui-se um sujeito autônomo na sua aprendizagem de língua inglesa.

The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, networkable and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue).

In this article, I explore how digital data collection in the context of the Berkeley-Abiquiú Collaborative Archaeology (BACA) project works, some of the affordances of this new-ish technology, and how they articulate with analogue art practices to achieve the goals of engaged research. Thinking with affordances helps me reflect critically on what digital data recording offers our research goals. In this case, the most important aspect of using digital data recording is how it changes our relationship to time. New orientations of research time created by such technology is an opportunity to engage creatively with how archaeology can represent complexity, produce embodied experience, and share senses of place through both digital and analogue practices. As archaeologists trying to think trans-humanistically, we need to reflect critically on digital technologies to produce engaged research. This is always a shifting target. New uses reveal new possibilities, and vice versa. But newness is not what makes an impact, a difference, or changes the way we do research together; what makes a difference is the result, effects, and affects of these affordances.

The animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a digital file format with a long history within internet cultures and digital content. Emblematic of the early Web, the GIF fell from favor in the late 1990s before experiencing a resurgence that has seen the format become ubiquitous within digital communication. While the GIF has certain technical affordances that make it highly versatile, this is not the sole reason for its ubiquity. Instead, GIFs have become a key communication tool in contemporary digital cultures thanks to a combination of their features, constraints, and affordances. GIFs are polysemic, largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge. The combined impact of these capabilities imbues the GIF with resistant potential, but it has also made it ripe for commodification. In this article, we outline and articulate the GIF’s features and affordances, investigate their implications, and discuss their broader significance for digital culture and communication.

Spatial dislocation of migrants is a catalyst for early, heavy and informed media use (Ponzanesi & Leurs 2014); as well as a motif for transnational families to form families of choice (Beck-Gernsheim 1998; Weston 1997). This text reports on how Irish-Spanish families living in Ireland manage this situation. It argues that (digital) photographic exchanges give rise to mediated third places (Oldenburg, 1989), where (dis)affect and belonging are negotiated. Transnational families visually mediate their domestic spaces regularly. The double visual mediation of presence and space forms part of their everyday. This, in turn, outlines current developments in how (digital) photography is used to mediate actions and emotions. In accounting for and reflecting about how (dis)affective communities of place activate affordances of media, photography emerges as a multi-dimensional site of image production, distribution and storage, in short, as a practice that is both unique to the socio-cultural moment in which it is embedded, and general enough to be recognized as such across cultures and societies. Keywords: diaspora, experience of place, new media, photography, visual mediation

What does children’s play look like in the smart toy era? What conceptual frameworks help make sense of the changing practices of children’s connected play worlds? Responding to these questions, this article re-frames discussions about children’s smart toy play within wider theoretical debates about the affordances of new digital materialities. To understand recent transformations of children’s play practices, we propose it is necessary to think of toys as increasingly media-like in their affordances and as connected to wider digital material ecosystems. To demonstrate the potential of this conceptual approach, we explore illustrative examples of two popular smart ‘care toys’. Our analysis identifies three examples of affordances that smart care toys share with other forms of mobile and robotic media: liveliness, affective stickiness and portability. We argue that locating discussions of smart toys within wider conceptual debates about digital materialities can provide new insights into the changing landscape of children’s play.

The history of algorithmic composition using a digital computer has undergone many representations—data structures that encode some aspects of the outside world, or processes and entities within the program itself. Parallel histories in cognitive science and artificial intelligence have (of necessity) confronted their own notions of representations, including the ecological perception view of J.J. Gibson, who claims that mental representations are redundant to the affordances apparent in the world, its objects, and their relations. This review tracks these parallel histories and how the orientations and designs of multimodal interactive systems give rise to their own affordances: the representations and models used expose parameters and controls to a creator that determine how a system can be used and, thus, what it can mean.

WhatsApp’s implementation of end-to-end encryption has been celebrated by many. Intriguingly, though, the invisible affordance was made visible with an individual message to each conversation. In this research, we “properly scrutinize” the roll-out of the affordance in historical perspective inspired by the “platform biography” approach, critically comparing corporate and media documentation with an analysis of the attributes and affordances that refer to the realm of privacy and security with focus on the end-to-end encryption. After pointing the contradictions with evidences found, we conclude that the implementation should be interpreted neither as a plain idealistic saga for user privacy and security by the App’s founders nor as simply a market-oriented approach—though both are clearly components of the company’s motives—but as a strategic move inserted in a: (1) Public Relations guerrilla strategy from WhatsApp Inc. facing national States and respective intelligence agencies or law enforcement institutions, in which context the development and implementation of affordances reveals a (2) power move by corporate digital media to avoid political conflict against vigilante state power and therefore the App’s subsistent vulnerabilities in terms of privacy and security should be read as (3) a tradeoff between commercial massiveness at the expense of technological utopia.

Abstract The article at hand analyses the aesthetic dimension of contemporary “tech companies,” particularly how their characteristic rhetoric of creativity, collaboration and disruption is built into the aesthetics of the physical work environments. For that purpose, proceduralist reading and environmental storytelling, usually applied to analyse meaning-making in digital game spaces, are adapted to conduct a comparative spatial affordance analysis on material from Officesnapshots, one of the largest online repositories for workspace documentation. Expanding upon earlier definitions of spatial affordances as quasi-textual features, the article defines the design elements of tech offices as a continuation of verbal and (audio-)visual corporate rhetoric employed by companies like Google, Facebook or Etsy. It thereby contributes a material-semiotic dimension to current debates about the epistemic implications of these software platforms, which José van Dijck summarises using the term “platform society.” Besides game and play studies, elements of architectural semiotics and cultural analyses of support spaces (e.g. Kracauer 1999 and Moran 2005) as well as broader concepts such as the politics of theming (Freitag 2017) or the embedding of digital technologies into physical spaces (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) complement the theoretical framework.

This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it does in democratic governing. The empirical work focuses on how ICIJ’s data mining, manipulation and visualisation interface with traditional governing institutions of accountability. The article relates the affordances present in the ICIJ to modes of societal control that are available through Brighenti’s consideration of visibility as a social category and governmentality scholarship through three theoretical moves: bifurcating affordance theory on communicative and political planes, relaying a complimentarily delineated model of media apparatus and considering how such apparatuses shift towards proto-institutions.

In this paper, the authors examine the potential and the reality of pan-Canadian digital curriculum policy access in the current web-enabled global landscape. The authors discuss theory related to the affordances offered by digital technologies for the sharing of research and policy, as well as theory relative to knowledge mobilization and communities of practice, both of which support collaboration and consultation for informed policy development. The authors present their findings from two investigations to test digital access to curriculum policies across Canada’s provinces and territories through their Ministry of Education websites. Through this analysis, the authors provide evidence of the current affordances and barriers related to digital access to curriculum policies and offer suggestions to facilitate knowledge mobilization around curricular responses to child and adolescent health issues.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse empirical studies regarding the use of digital talking books (Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) books) as well as the possibilities and limitations that users with print disabilities encounter when using these books. Upon fulfilment of this purpose, it is also possible to identify research needs in the area of talking books. Design/methodology/approach – An analysis of 12 empirical studies concerning the use of DAISY books is conducted. The concept of affordances is employed in the analysis, which focuses on: users of talking books, talking books as objects, and the social settings in which talking books are used. Findings – First, the reviewed literature indicates that the navigational features of the DAISY talking book appear to provide unprecedented affordances in terms of the users’ approaches to reading. However, the affordances of talking books depend, to some extent, on whether the users have visual impairments or dyslexia/reading and writing difficulties. Second, the reviewed literature illustrates that the affordances provided by talking books depend on the settings in which they are used, both in terms of specific social situations and wider socio-political contexts. Originality/value – Although the need for assistive reading technologies, such as digital talking books, is large, research in this area is scarce, particularly from a user perspective. This paper describes the results of those studies which have actually been conducted on this topic and highlights areas that require further study.

Aim/Purpose: This paper provides a general-purpose categorization scheme for assessing the utility of new and emerging three-dimensional interactive digital environments (3D-IDEs), along with specific pedagogic approaches that are known to work. It argues for the use of 3D-IDEs on the basis of their ludic appeal and ability to provide intrinsic motivation to the learner, and their openness that allows the learner to gain a more holistic understanding of a topic. Background: Researchers have investigated the affordances, benefits, and drawbacks of individual 3D-IDEs, such as virtual worlds, but teachers lack a general-purpose approach to assessing new 3D-IDEs as they appear and applying them to teaching practice. Methodology: The categorization scheme is based on the analysis, reflection, and comprehension of the research on limitations, challenges, and opportunities for teaching in virtual environments by Angel Rueda, Valdes Godines and Guzmán Flores; the scheme is discussed in terms of an experiment to trial virtual genetics labs in Second Life. Contribution: The paper describes a general-purpose approach to applying existing and new 3D virtual spaces to education, shows a worked example of the use of the categories, and describes six approaches to consider in applying these technologies. Findings: 3D-IDEs are categorized in terms of the way in which they interface with the user’s senses and their ability to provide ‘immersion’; two forms of immersion are examined: digital perceptual immersion – the generated sense of reality – and ludic narrative immersion – a less cognitive and more emotional engagement with the learning environment. Recommendations for Practitioners: Six specific forms of pedagogy appropriate for 3D-IDEs are examined and discussed, in terms of the affordances and technology required, as assessed by the categorization scheme. More broadly, the paper argues for a change in the assessment of new digital technologies from the technology’s features to its affordances and the pedagogies it can support. Recommendation for Researchers: The paper offers a practical approach to choosing and using 3D-IDEs for education, based upon previous work. The next step is to trial the scheme with teachers to ascertain its ease of use and effectiveness. Impact on Society: The paper argues strongly for a new approach to teaching, where the learner is encouraged to use 3D-IDEs in a ludic manner in order to generate internal motivation to learn, and to explore the topic according to their individual learning needs in addition to the teacher’s planned route through the learning material. Future Research: The categorization scheme is intended to be applied to new technologies as they are introduced. Future research is needed to assess its effectiveness and if necessary update the scheme.

Social media platforms are associated with significant digital transformations but also carry some uncertainty for organisations seeking to capitalise on their affordances while developing new professional roles. This article explores the characteristics and contexts of social media work and the different approaches of organisations as they enter a second wave of application, moving beyond participation to data extraction within conditions of continuous connectivity and community management. The article uses hybrid methods: analysing job market data and in-depth interviews with 18 social media strategists and workers from 13 different organisations. The analysis is informed by critical accounts of digital labour, and emphasises organisations’ strategic search for new affordances such as analytics that extract additional value from carefully managed communities. The findings reveal how social media work has become diffused across industries, and is understood ‘ecologically’, as a capability that operates right across organisations within a dynamic and changing media environment.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider whether consumers can recover from a service failure by utilizing internal and external energy resources that are available to them at the time of an online complaint. Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this research conceptualizes the complainers' act of complaining through internal and external energy resources. By investing (direct utilization of resources) and mobilizing (utilizing resources to change the trajectory of a loss) these resources, this study aims to understand which resources (internal or external) and what strategies (investment or mobilization) are effective in the face of a resource loss.Design//methodology/approachStudy 1 aimed to test the impact of energy resources (motivation and affordance) on consumers' negative emotions and satisfaction with their complaints through an online panel survey. Study 2 was a between-subjects design experiment aimed to overcome the diversity of the circumstances around a service failure, complaint motivation and complaints that were captured in Study 1.FindingsThis study provides evidence of the negative and positive effects of internal and external energy resources, respectively, in altering the consumer's emotions and behavioral intentions. The findings of this study underline the role of affordances of features, specifically perceived conversationality of digital features, in improving consumers' relationship with the defaulting firm.Practical implicationsBased on the findings related to the perceived conversationality of digital features, managers are urged to explore the affordances of online features that consumers use for communications, in general, or for complaints, in particular.Originality/valueTo our understanding, this paper is the first study to employ COR theory as a conceptual background, and in turn, the first to conceptualize complaint motivations and online complaint features as internal and external resources, respectively. As such, this study is the first of its kind to examine complaint media systematically.

Over the last few decades, ethnographers have begun to orient to the digital world as both a site of new data and a domain of study itself. Alongside new technologies has come a host of emergent ethical dilemmas. In this methodological paper, I describe some of the ethical challenges and productive possibilities of going digital when engaged in ethnographic research. Drawing upon the theory of affordances, I discuss the ongoing ethical debate around what counts as public versus private, as well as the closely related concerns regarding treating online data as texts versus that which is generated by human subjects. I also examine some of the potential affordances of going digital, including the possibility of leveraging digital spaces to expand representation and engage citizen researchers. Throughout, I draw upon empirical examples from a virtual ethnography focused on the everyday life of a woman who identifies as autistic.

A sense of belonging is an integral feature of an online community of learners (OCL). This article explores the ways in which digital technologies in an online teacher education programme can facilitate social presence and in turn nurture a sense of belonging in an OCL. A sense of belonging can lower attrition rates in distance programmes that attract learners who are marginalised from on campus education. This can help address issues of social justice by supporting equitable access and participation in higher education. Findings from a qualitative case study indicate the power that digital technologies can have in facilitating social presence and a sense of belonging in an OCL. This study identifies the importance of several factors in this. Firstly, the importance of pedagogical understandings that digital technologies have different affordances in nurturing an OCL, and secondly, that each participant had a different perspective on the affordances of each digital technology in their usefulness for fostering social presence and a sense of belonging.

Kress and Van Leeuwen’s book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006[1996]) provides a robust framework for describing modality in visual texts. However, in the digital age, familiar markers of modality are being creatively reconfigured. New technological affordances, including new modes of production, multiple platforms for distribution, and increased user control of modal variables, raise questions about the role of modality in contemporary communication practices and require the framework to be adapted and further developed. This article attempts to set the agenda for such adaptations and, more generally, for rethinking visual modality and its impact in the digital age.

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a considerable body of research has investigated benefits and issues associated with digital literacy tools in medicine, we consider the affordances of paper-based practices. Our analysis of verbal interaction and textual artifacts drawn from a qualitative study of oncology visits indicates that the uses of pen and paper are advantageous for both doctor and patient. Specifically, they allow doctors to process and package information in ways that are favorable to their personal modus operandi, and they enable patients to participate in the medical visit and take an active role in managing their medical treatment. Understanding the affordances of paper-based literacy provides insights for refining digital tools as well as for motivating the design of possible hybrid forms and digital-analog intersections that can best support medical practices.

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context to the institutional setting. The article considers technologies as possessing communicative affordances — opportunities for action made possible or delimited through their use. Technologies bring new interactive resources to the process of ed­ucation and can affect the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyzed video recordings of the telemediated interaction of Russia-based students and teachers within a gamified online educational module. We investigate a case in which a student’s correct answer is nevertheless corrected by the teacher. We dem­onstrate that the teacher initiates the correction because they are guided by the ordering of the game elements within the interface. Based on a detailed analysis of the teacher’s mouse movement in relation to ongoing turns-at-talk, we show that this orientation is sustained by all participants. The work contributes to classroom interaction studies and affordance theory and develops the methodology of multimodal transcription for mediated contexts. The primary result of the study is an empirical demonstration that the relevance of technological affordances for interactants is situation­ally produced, and that this process is associated with the interweaving of the institutional and technical context of interaction. The conclusion discusses the relationship between affordances and institutional norms.

This paper examines what qualities and affordances of a digital object allow it to emerge as a new cultural object in its own right. Due to the relationship between authenticity and replication, this is particularly important for digital objects derived from real world objects, such as digital ‘replicas’. Such objects are not an inauthentic or surrogate form of an ‘authentic’ object, but a new object with a complex relationship to the original and its own uses and affordances. The Digital Laocoön Immersive (VR exhibit), part of an AHRC funded project, was a response to the tragic fires at the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 and 2018. In this project a digital replica of a plaster cast of Laocoön, with a long history of use within the school, was chosen as the centre piece for the proposed immersive. As a consequence of both the immersive’s design methodology and the lessons learnt in its production, the Laocoön proved to be an ideal subject through which to critically assess the question of the status of the replica. This paper will explore not only how the material infrastructure, form and content of digital representations have an impact on its broader set relationships, but how the concept of an extended object, its production processes, and the way that these are explicitly acknowledged (or not), operate on its relationship to the original.

This study examines how a specific digital space—the Reddit message board dedicated to a discussion of the murder case featured on the podcast Serial—affords its users the ability to transcend the spatiotemporal limitations of traditional journalistic and criminal justice practices in the collection, validation, and deliberation of evidence. The digital discourse on the Serial subReddit can be understood, using concepts derived from network society theory (Castells, 2005) as a form of deliberative digital democracy (Dahlberg, 2011) in which crowdsourced evidence bears the weight of establishing the “rational” nature of a constructive, public discourse about practices employed by democratic institutions. However, the same evidence serves to reveal the limits of this form of digital deliberation when it is used in the practice of “doxing”—the online, public posting of private information about private individuals (Davison, 2012). This tension reveals the complicated relationship between democracy, privacy, and emerging technologies.