Social and Interactive Media

Lucy Wormald

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Pegasus Books

For best experience click here to view the Storymaps in full screen 

A site of magic and joy for me, Pegasus Books is my safe haven in the city. An emporium of books and art and knick-knacks located in Left Bank Arcade off Cuba Street Mall, it exudes a nostalgic charm and intrigue that draws you into a jumbled world that celebrates literature and discovery in its colours, smells and sounds. This is a space I visit often to soothe me from stress and worry, to reconnect me with my love of literature and to rekindle my sense of wonder at the world.  I selected this space for representation because I wanted to both pay homage to such a place and also explore the idea that the sensation I feel within its physical space could be translated, and expanded upon, in a digital format. I am interested in multi-faceted experience and the role that the engagement of each sense plays in generating a physical and psychological sensation, and how this sensation becomes a projected aspect of a spaces identity. With a rapidly digitalisating society it was an opportunity to see if Farman’s thesis of marrying ‘the virtual and the material’ (2015, 105) could be engaged and the two spheres of experience (physical and digital) could be interchangeable and complementary.

Purposely aiding the mystique and back-alley secrecy of the space is Pegasus Book’s muted modes of digital representation. Limited to several sites, half of which are owner-created, Pegasus Book’s restricted and rudimentary digital visibility highlights the relationship between the physical and the virtual and how the lack of digital presence plays a role in the spaces whole identity. The ingrained instant availability of technology and digital access to spaces in ‘the fabric of everyday life’ (Farman 2015, 108) has generated a lack of acknowledgment of how this mode of communication influences the representation. Thus, when a space, such as Pegasus Books, has a limited or incomplete digital representation, it takes on a new meaning and forces the audience to perceive the space differently than they would a space with high digital visibility (Ling 2012, 34). With a website and Facebook that prioritises charm in simplicity, the owner-created platforms replicate the quaintness of its physical representation, engaging in basic business presentation, books for sale and literary articles.  A feature that clearly represents the nature of the space is the video that Pegasus Books has posted as their cover video on Facebook. Mysterious in tone and length, the video digitalises the obscurity and artistic attractiveness that the business wishes to maintain and promote as its identity, and yet only works to hint at the reality of its physical space, encouraging the audience to come and experience its representation in material form. Other sites that represent the space take much the same approach, neatplaces.co.nz, www.localist.co.nz and concreteplayground.com presenting it as a charming local independent bookstore that has to be visited to be appreciated. 

The limited digital visibility of Pegasus Books has afforded me a large opportunity to convey the space in an original and detailed manner. The story I am telling about this space is a personal one, how its visual and aural features make me feel and what they restore in me. Through expressing the sensation this space generates for me via ode, image, audio and description, I wanted to increase the depth of Pegasus Book’s digital narrative in it in a multi-sensory way. Engaging Farman’s notion of a ‘dialogic relationship’ (2015, 107), I aimed to convey not a simulation or a replacement of the real, but an ‘augmented representation of the physical’ by ‘offering experiences of the non-tangible elements’ (2015, 107). From my storymap, the audience will have insight into the ramshackle nature of the shop and hopefully garner the sense of joy it can offer, and yet also provide an understanding of the role a digitised interpretation of a space can have on the perception of its identity. 

Works Cited

 Ling, R. “Taken for grantedness: The embedding of mobile communication into society”. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2012.

 Farman, Jason. “Stories, spaces, and bodies: The production of embodied space through mobile media storytelling”. Communication Research and Practice. Vol. 1 No. 2. 2015

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ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: A Downhill Demonstration

When joining the throes of revolution is simply a click or a share away how much weight and value can online activism have? There has been much contestation, as is summed up in Malcom Gladwell’s questioning article on digital political organisation, on whether online activism, from petitions to protest hashtags to movement groups on social media platforms, has any real influence on manifesting physical change or rather acts as a new medium to exercise social capital and self-branding. 

A new beacon of hope for inducing change? Or a false idol?

Activist internet activities have been criticised for inducing ‘slactivism’, a term that refers to engaging with political activities that have no impact on real life outcomes, instead only serving to increase ‘feel-good’ experiences of the participants (Morozov, 2009). The concern over this is especially justified as the mellowing of political engagement distracts from more effective and direct forms of activism.

Manipulating a tool for real change into a booster for self esteem and self branding as a civically engaged individual. 

 Despite this, the internet thrives off interactivity and conversation, the new features of social media sites inviting discourse and networking, derailing traditional political hierarchies and subverting the relationship between authority and public voice, offering a hyper-connected platform for collaboration, coordination and organisation. The viral phenomenon of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a prime example of an online activism awareness scheme that, whilst originally proving the immense power and collective engagement that vitality can offer internet activism, demonstrates how the low-risk and novelty of it can remove it from serious change and awareness altogether.  

Whilst vitality connects people, a unity necessary for successful activism, the ALS challenge did not successfully inform or spread awareness. Image Source.

The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and fund further research. Participation was simple, as is necessary to get people to engage, with individuals needing to pour ice water on themselves and film it within 24 hours of being nominated or donate $100  to ALS Association. Whilst raising over 2 million dollars, the videos soon became cynosures that were performed to garner online attention and amass social capital through the simple act of participating in a collective act. 

Many celebrities (Donald Trump pictured) participated in the challenge, helping to raise funds. Yet, was their intention behind this pure or was it an opportunity for social capital also? Trump’s video fails to mention anything on ALS. Image Source. 

Many posts I personally saw failed to mention AHS or information about it, rather focusing on providing entertainment through funny reactions and connecting through tagging friends as nominees. From my perspective, the AHS ice bucket challenge became self-indulgent, losing the spark of its original, intended objective and the potential to inform, instead joining the ranks of novel ‘slactivism’ and failing to raise the true awareness it desired.

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Pegasus Books

Pegasus Books. It’s Wellingtonian iconicity paradoxical in its back-alley secrecy. Named after the hero of classical lore, who gave rise to the Fountain of Muses: inspiration and literature, Pegasus Books is a unique space both physically and in its muted digital representation.

Located in Left Bank Arcade, Cuba Street, Pegasus Books is an ‘off-the-radar’ place, the type that is a joy and an adventure to stumble upon. Image source: NeatPlaces.com

With a website and Facebook that prioritises charm in simplicity, the owner-created platforms replicate the quaintness of its physical representation, engaging in basic business presentation, books for sale and literary articles.  A feature that clearly represents the nature of the space is the video that Pegasus Books has posted as their cover video on Facebook. Mysterious in tone and length, the video digitalises the obscurity and artistic attractiveness that the business wishes to maintain and promote as its identity. Aiding this internet interpretation of the space are several Wellington information sites, such as neatplaces.co, Under the Radar and The Localist, which all use visual-based techniques to communicate the space’s aesthetic. By saying little yet intriguing the viewer, the authors contribute further to the sense of mystery and instinct character, encouraging the space to be physically occupied in order to be understood and appreciated.

Pegasus Books’ biography on NeatPlaces.co Wellington lures the reader in with its limited information and intriguing visuals. 

 I love trawling through the jumble and chaos of its books and shelves, relishing the sense of personal journey and sense of privacy, both of which evoke a magic, this affords me when I am in its physical space. I am interested, for my digital story-telling assignment, how this personal perception of the bookshop may be translated into a digital representation of the space, and how this may alter its definition and purpose both physically and online.

Image Source: http://www.kennedywrites.com/2011/06/what-youre-missing-in-wellington-and-marlborough

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Snapchat: A Game Changing Platform

Through its ephemerality and rejection of virtual attention economy, Snapchat defies traditional social media conventions, providing its users with an authentic replication of real world interaction and rhetoric. Crafted for a generation obsessed with perfection, facade and the attainment of social capital, the mobile application subverts established social media norms of profiling, premeditation and self-branding to create a cyber community that connects and interacts upon the premise of intimate and exclusive authenticity. Whilst many have contested the applications claim to social media status, in conjunction with Grahame Meikle’s academic definition of social media as ‘networked database platforms that combine public with personal communication’ (2016, 6), the interpersonal and communal communicational purpose of the app undoubtedly grants Snapchat such a title.

Snapchat logo:  is a ghost to represent the ephemeral nature of their photo-sending

Its intentional control of ephemerality, audience and content distribution offers its users social enjoyment and entertainment (Bayer et al 2016, 16) as its principal objective. In virtue of this, it is essential when analysing Snapchat’s place in today’s social media landscape to consider the escalating ubiquity of socially networked visuals and their contemporary importance in constructing identity and social connections and how Snapchat’s purpose and affordances both contribute to and reform this.

Affordances of ephemerality

In response to the challenges of persistent media there has been a growing collective attraction to platforms that are designed to erase communication and shared artefacts after a period of time. Whilst research shows that traditional social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram are greatly valued for their archiving and profiling capacity (Zhao & Lindley 2014, 2431-2435), the persistency of content posted on these platforms generate self-presentation complexes (Berger 2013, 293), an increased audience size, and loss of sovereignty over the context in which content is viewed. Thus, many social media subscribers, especially youth, are turning to ephemeral and intimate-viewing platforms to socialise, connect and document. The most popular of these platforms, with one hundred and sixteen million daily users, is Snapchat, an application that counteracts the challenges of permanence and privacy that traditional social medias possess. An image based mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown at Stanford University in 2011 (J.J. Colao, 2012), Snapchat allows its users to send images, videos, and text as a form of communication and entertainment for a specified and controlled amount of time for receivers to view, before the content becomes permanently inaccessible.

Users can set the viewing time of their content from 1 to 10 seconds. A newer feature, the infinity timer, allows users to sanction their receivers an ‘infinite’ glance at the content, however it still permanently disappears after the receiver taps off.

These actions offer users the affordances of ephemeral profile and content, a heightened privacy and a sense of real-life and synchronous interaction, all of which shape the uses and perceptions of the visual medium (Kaun & Stiernstedt 2014). As per J.J. Gibson’s theory, affordances are defined as what the environment ‘offers, provides and furnishes’ the individual (127). Affordances exist as a part of the Snapchat application regardless of whether they are recognised and harnessed by the user, thus the theory of affordances includes the Snapchat platform in which actions take place, the visual and text content, the possible and allowable actions of this content, and the user and receiver. Snapchat’s primary feature for sharing to a larger audience is called a Story, a slide show montage of a users images and video clips that are played in a chronological order (Manjoo 2016). Innovative in its subversion of traditional reverse chronological ordering of events, this feature affords viewers a realistic and refreshingly unrefined experience of time and its relation to content and events. 

Snapchat story. Source: Marie Claire (http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/news/a17165/how-to-snapchat/)

Due to the camera feature of the app, the visual photograph has shifted from being the subject of the medium to the form of interpersonal communication. This convergence of photography and mobile communication as Snapchats mode of interaction and sharing means that correspondence is increasingly directed towards sharing and communicating the present (Villi 2012, 39-54), allowing the user to connect immediately and authentically to both friends and greater events. This is significant in that Snapchat is primarily about capturing and sharing a specific, fleeting moment. It is this premise of the platform that recontextualises the traditional uses and perceptions of shared visual images from an artefact of social capital and permanent self-representation to an affordance of using ephemeral visual documentation to interact, generate rhetoric and create temporary, and thus authentic, representation and archive. An example of an entity correctly utilising Snapchat’s unique challenging of traditional interpretation of image sharing is the U.S. daily newspaper, The Washington Post. Whilst having an article-based feature on the Snapchat Discover feature which hosts media companies and current news, the Washington Post also has a ‘personal’ account users can add to view live Stories covering real-time events and news around the U.S. and to contact them with questions, scoops and experiences of current events.

The Washington Post is a prime example of a larger entity using Snapchat for its transient and real-time features, affording the company instant and unmediated connection with users.

Story published content ranges from White House press events to social rallies to art gallery tours, allowing The Washington Post to establish itself as both a trusted and non-partisan media outlet, as a source of knowledge and as a legitimate and relevant organisation.The ephemeral yet instantaneous nature of Snapchat’s network allows for news to be presented visually in an unbiased and authentic form directly from the time and place of the event.

Washington Post’s news content on Snapchat’s Discover feature

This example further demonstrates the affordance of social connectedness through the sharing of moments, events, feelings and memories. The established norm of displaying authenticity on the platform means that content must be spontaneously generated and attentively absorbed by individuals as opposed to a calculated editing, archiving and sharing to a contextually collapsed mass audience. On an interpersonal, individual to individual scale, Villi argues that this unique photo message offers users both ‘interpersonal, shared experience, and mutual view of the same world through the photograph’ (2012, 42-43), the apps ephemerality and its purpose to capture fleeting acts further affording individuals to self-represent and interact without the pressure of perfection and having to have edited images/content beforehand.

Snapchats privacy affordances and a new social surveillance

The creators of Snapchat have established the application’s communication norms in opposition to traditional social media applications, such as MySpace and Facebook which focus on creating a public profile and archiving experiences. Instead, the direct and intimate interaction network that Snapchat fosters has ushered in a new mode of online privacy and social surveillance. According to BI Intelligence's 2017 Digital Trust survey, Snapchat is the most trusted platform by users for privacy and the protection of personal data (Elder 2017). It is this trust and the premise of intimate privacy that Snapchat has generated that encourages the sharing and communicating of genuine and authentic content. The limited agency and the ephemerality of the image affords the user an assurance of privacy and temporary cyber presence, yet it is essential to consider that the sense of privacy that the app affords is reliant upon the accepted norm of trust between sender, receiver and the platform.

Whilst screenshotting has to a degree become a norm of Snapchatting, there is still an element of trust between sender and recipient that the content will not be shared beyond their interaction.

The time customisation of the recording feature affords Snapchat users to arrange their visual and text messages to permanently disappear after a predetermined time period. For many users, this feature provides the gratification of maintaining privacy whilst connecting with friends in an authentic manner on the app. Studies by cyberpsychologist T. Franklin Waddell indicate that Snapchat messages were perceived by users as affording the ability to share photographs without the traditional concern that the content may be viewed by unsanctioned users, thus constraining the extent of social surveillance allowed by the app. For example, one participant explained ‘‘you send ugly faces and things like that, and you’re not worried about it getting posted on Facebook, after that 10 second burst you’re never going to see that photo again, so I think that definitely plays a role in why and what people snap (Waddell 2016, 442)”. Similarly another noted that: ‘‘I would say its privacy because you can make the ugliest face you want to and unless someone screen shots it, you know no one will see it, so you can be super intimate with a friend just like you’re right next to them’’ (Waddell 2016, 442). The temporary nature not only provides an illusion of non-mediation, it completely counteracts the constraint of a permanent of a cyber identity and trail that has become synonymous with technological use. Traditionally, the responsibility of content and ownership has been placed on the sender or poster, with platforms such as Facebook and Instagram permanently linking content to the poster’s profile. However the ephemerality of Snapchat, and users disruption of this affordance through screenshotting, forwarding and recording, separates the content from the possession and control of the owner. Technology blogger Jenny Davis argues that whilst Snapchat provides a more secure level of privacy than profile-based social medias, the app causes “displacement of trust from a message recipient, to the technology itself” (2013), an act that undermines and disrupts the notion of intimate and exclusive communication of Snapping and uploading Stories that the app developed to counteract the contextual collapse and inauthentic attention economy of predecessor platforms. Thus to achieve the level of privacy Snapchat marketed as one of its greatest affordances through its limited-time viewing feature, the norm of trust between sender, recipient and platform must be continually honoured.

CONCLUSION

The transient and spontaneous nature of documenting and sharing on Snapchat connects an audience to content instantly, unaccompanied by the social media norm of mediation and self-branding complex. This refusal to engage in the attention economy and façade of perfection that fuels other visual-based social media platforms has changed the game for how technology users employ features, perceive affordances and forge social connections. Snapchat reforms the notion of photography from being a subject to being viewed as a medium, in this process subverting meaning of the form, shifting it from being an artefact of modification and distorted reality to a communication tool representing an authentic visual of individuality and time.  

Works Cited

Bayer, J.B., Ellison, N.B., Schoenebeck, S.Y., Falk. E.B. “Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat, Information, Communication & Society”. Taylor and Francis Online. 2016.  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1084349

Berger, J. “Beyond Viral: Interpersonal Communication in the Internet Age”. Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4. 2013. DOI:10.1080/1047840X.2013.842203

Colao. J.J. “Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App Since Instagram”. Forbes. November 27, 2012. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/27/snapchat-the-biggest-no-revenue-mobile-app-since-instagram/#1abe41117200

Davis, Jenny. “In Snapchat We Trust”. Cyborgology. February 12, 2013. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/02/12/in-snapchat-we-trust/

Elder, Robert. “Snapchat tops Facebook and Twitter for online privacy”. Business Insider. April 28, 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-tops-facebook-and-twitter-on-consumer-privacy-heres-why-brands-should-care-2017-4/?r=AU&IR=T

Gibson, James. “The Theory of Affordances”. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986.

Kaun, A., Stiernstedt, F. “Facebook time: Technological and institutional affordances for media memories”. New Media and Society. Vol. 16, No. 7. 2014. DOI:10.1177/1461444814544001

Manjoo, Farhad. “While We Weren’t Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks”. The New York Times. Online. November 30, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/technology/while-we-werent-looking-snapchat-revolutionized-social-networks.html?mcubz=1

Meikle, Graham. “Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility”. Taylor & Francis Online. 2016. http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315884172

Villi, Mikko. “Visual chitchat: The use of camera phones in visual interpersonal communication.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture. Vol. 3, No. 1. 2012.

Waddell, T. Franklin. “The Allure of Privacy or the Desire for Self-Expression? Identifying Users’ Gratifications for Ephemeral, Photograph-Based Communication”. Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking. Vol. 19, No. 7. 2016. University of Florida. DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2015.0677

Zhao, X., Lindley, S. “Curation through use : Understanding the personal value of social media”. Proceedings of CHI. Vol. 15. 2014. http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=2702123.2702221

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Who owns the content?

It is an odd sensation, the feeling of lost sovereignty over self that comes with posting content online. Shrouded with social acceptance and normalisation, this feeling has become a norm of online privacy affordances. There seems to have been a collective social agreement that once content is posted or shared on an online platform, it no longer belongs to the individual but is an article of public possession, free to be acquired, interpreted, shared and edited by absolutely anyone. 

Who does posted content belong to? The content subject? The sharer? The appropriator? (Image source: Alamy) 

As quoted in Megan Whelan’s Wireless article, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in 2010 that privacy is no longer a social norm, it is no longer achievable nor expected within the affordances of the internet. I wholly agree with Zuckerberg’s statement, yet the reality of this does not sit right with my ethical compass. Elements of respect for boundaries and contexts are missing from the conversation of ownership. The case of actor Teuila Blakely, as examined in Whelan’s piece,  demonstrates the normalised attitude of acceptance towards privacy and ownership disempowerment. Videoed partaking in a sex act with a prominent rugby league player, the content of Blakely spiralled its way to Twitter and eventually to mainstream media outlets. 

Blakely and friend Konrad Hurrell, who also featured in the leaked video.

Blakely claims an acceptance of the culture of sharing explicit content in a small circle, saying that the act of sharing the content made her the one responsible for the fact of it leaking to greater media. Whilst I admit that Blakely is correct in acknowledging the reality of sharing norms, I believe an ethical boundary was crossed in sharing the explicit content of her to a greater audience without her prior knowledge and permission. 

Whilst Blakely accepts the nature of sharing content, she was unprepared for and at the online backlash she copped as a result of the video being shared to a wider audience without permission. (Source: NowToLove blog) 

It seems internet users are conditioned to accept shifting boundaries and no longer question the emotional, social and psychological ramifications the act of sharing and recontextualising another content can have on the individual.  

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Brewing A Following: Starbucks

Social media platforms have empowered consumers to interact with brands, products and other consumers in unprecedented ways. This afford a unique dynamic between consumers and brands that revolves around participation, interaction and customisation.  

Whilst this allows consumers a heightened experience of brands and product, the greatest beneficiary is the brands who are able to manipulate customer interaction and feedback to develop products, target audiences and communication, using the intimacy and relaxed tone of social media to forge closer relationships with consumers.

A brand that has mastered the manipulation of social media is Starbucks. Having amassed a gigantic following on all their social media presences, the coffee chain presents their platforms as forums to promote new products, celebrate consumer appreciation, negotiate consumer feedback and promote Starbucks, not only as a brand, but as an aesthetic and a community presence.

Twitter Starbucks Twitter feed is filled with photographs of new and favourite products, re-tweets from consumers that are individually replied to and updates on up and coming Starbucks news. Primarily, Starbucks uses Twitter as a service to connect with consumers talking about their in-store, product and general brand experiences.

Promoting new products

Sharing customer experiences 

Dealing with consumer complaints with direct responses

The direct line of communication that Tweeting, re-Tweeting and replying to Tweets offers Starbucks a unique and extremely personal form of interaction between consumer responses and experiences and their control over the brand, creating a relationship that generates the brands aim of being a individualised, personable, solicitous and engaged.

Instagram

The millennial generation’s preoccupation with visual appeal and aesthetic means that visual media plays a dominant factor of brands success.  Starbucks has cleverly developed coffee culture into including the appreciation of aesthetically pleasing coffees and cups especially and specifically consumers with Starbucks cups through its own share of photography on social media sites like Instagram. Photography of Starbucks products has, over the past decade, become something of a pop culture phenomenon, with many social media users playing into this craze and photographing and sharing pictures of Starbucks products, which Starbucks then often re-gram, achieving both a participation of consumers in brand image and a form of free marketing. 

Regrams on Starbucks Instagram from a consumer who tagged the brand in their photo

As many Instagram feeds do, Starbucks grams promote a lifestyle through images of products, consumers and the culture where these two meet. Generating a visual aesthetic that promotes a comfy, satisfied and relaxed lifestyle works to visually advertise the brands principles and aims. 

Starbucks Instagram feed perpetuating an aesthetic that relates to a certain lifestyle that their target consumers would appreciate. 

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Bending those texting norms

In 1967, American socialist Harold Garfinkle tasked his students with an experiment to explore the creation and violation of social norms that have been naturalised. I performed the same experiment within the context of digital society, subverting text etiquette and expectations in order to analyse the results.

Different social contexts are typically socially constructed with clear social roles and expectations.  However, the contemporariness of technology has destabilised and blurred some of the parameters that previously organised social interaction. Christena Nippert-Eng claims that texting, emailing, virtual chatting and social media interaction have created a confusing mishmash of contexts that force individuals to “instantly transform [their] current frame of mind in order to accommodate whatever mentality is mandated by a newly appearing request”.

The affordances of texting allows the individual to send messages both casually and formally with immense speed of conversation, allowing for instant gratification. It provides the individual with the opportunity to pre-meditate their reaction to content and reply with  the safety of avoiding face-to face communication and the emotional and social vulnerability that that brings.

So what happens when one overshares, texts too quickly and frequently and the content is not cohesive, arbitrary and socially unsanctioned?

I chose to text both my mother and my brother to see if there was any influence of age and relationship upon the nature of response.

I wanted to play with fluctuations in tone and casualness to see what the reaction would be.

My brothers confusion was instant. I never normally indulge him with such detail, our conversations limited to the infrequent “Hey” and “How’s school?”. As I continued to subvert this norm we had created for out digital conversation he thought perhaps I had mistaken him for our mother, with him feeling this manner of communication would be better suited to her, who actually might care about every little thing I was doing.

I then mirrored the conversation with my mother who, endearingly, was flattered and enthused by my sudden desire to include her in a detailed communication of my day and began to overshare back to me!

This experiment demonstrates that there are indeed naturalised social rules and expectations when texting and these can differ according to relationship and age. 

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#makeamericagreatagain  Trump’s take on social media affordances

A controversial figure to being with, the 45th POTUS, Donald J. Trump, has manipulated the affordances of content and hegemonic etiquette of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate in unprecedented ways to the public. A notion developed by Gibson and Norman, affordance is generally used to describe what material artefacts such as media technologies allow people to do.  Rather than analysing the platform as an object, affordances perceive what possibilities of actions the platform may provide. In the case of Donald J. Trump, Twitter affords him a direct engagement with the public, an outlet for his personal perspective on phenomenons and a platform to distribute alternate facts. On the other hand, Facebook affords him a curated and deliberated platform to promote his administrations activities through the hegemonic and traditional use of social media.

Trump's Twitter feed is infamously characterised by its anomalous frankness. Whilst his feed is interspersed with curated posts and formal addresses to the American public about his policies, actions and achievements, what has truly challenged the traditional accepted affordances of the platform are his 140-character outbursts that often feature emotional reactionary content, poor spelling and grammar and unrestrained personal attacks on individuals and corporations that publicly oppose his presidency or presidential actions. The simplicity of Twitter’s customisation process and its instantaneous nature means that there is a lack of forethought or reflection needed for its actions and its possible interpretation of content and tone, thus allowing an instant engagement of emotion and personal insight between the public and Trump as both an individual and a president.

One of Trump’s most controversial tweet, posted at 3:27am in the morning, demonstrates his use of Twitter as a platform to subvert traditional behavioural expectations of his role, and personally attack another individual for criticising him.

A lack of grammatical attention and formality of tone is an affordance of Twitter’s platform that is, whilst out of line with presidential etiquette, a socially accepted ability of the website. 

In analysing the affordances Twitter offers Trump, it is important to consider the position of respect and power he is in. His manipulation of social media platforms and how that is perceived is unique to him due to his presidential context. Whilst perhaps indicative of a new era of ‘transparency’ and direct responsive engagement, Trump’s uncurated use of Twitter also potentially affords the compromising of principles associated with the presidential position. Studies of Trump’s tweets have found that people who display the combination of neurotic and unfiltered traits seen in his feed, “might use their creativity and change orientation to compete with others, to seek social distinction, and to achieve something truly new and unique.” Whilst perhaps breaking the mould of past presidential use of social media platforms, Trump manipulates the ability of Twitter to achieve this possibility.

In contrast to the POTUS’s Twitter feed, his Facebook page is clearly not controlled by Trump himself to the extent that his Twitter is. As Grint and Woller describe, technologies should be treated as texts which are written in certain ways by their developer producers marketers and have to be  ‘read’ (intepreted) by their users. These writers may seek to impose particular meaning and to constrain the range of possible interpretations open to users. These constraints are evident in the stricter social etiquette placed on Facebook posts in comparison to Tweets. The Facebook platform's affordances of comprehensive post customisation generates within the social requirement for posts for be considered, civil and within the hegemonic principles of presidential behaviour.

In comparison to Trump’s tweets, it is evident that his Facebook posts are ore reserved in content and tone and provide him with a platform to inform the public, detachedly, of his administrations agenda. 

Trump’s Facebook posts have never represented personal attacks or opinions on individuals or corporations, instead they follow a pattern of representing the Trump government’s agenda as a whole with posts delineating the collective administrations achievements, goals and activities, with Trump as their spokesperson.