how those Users utilise particular features and settings of the platform in order to construct membership. We are particularly interested in the material affordances of communication (Hutchby 2001b Markus and Silver 2008) provided to Users i.e. We focus on the role of Reddit itself in the social construction of Trumpism by Users of the platform with a particular focus on how affordances of Reddit influence narratives by enabling certain types of self-expression. 2017 Motivated by the importance of affordances, our study focusses on the digital media platform, known as Reddit, as a legitimate data source.
Relatedly, the influence of affordances of social media on political expression has gained traction (see Christensen 2011 Hapern and Gibbs 2013 Kreiss et al. Various studies demonstrate how social media affordances influence how individuals express themselves (see Halpern and Gibbs 2013 Morrison 2014 Fox and Moreland 2015). For instance, Facebook affords its users the indication of their preferences through likes, Twitter does this through retweets. These uses of particular features of technologies enable different forms of communication and self-expression. In other words, these are the uses particular features of objects/technologies afford users. “‘Affordance’ refers to the perceived and actual properties of a thing, primarily those functional properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.”(Salomon 1993, p. This has subsequently led to the construction of affordances.
Given the increase in usage of digital media platforms, the ways in which people are communicating are varied and continually evolving. As Sismondo ( 2017) argues, US politics has been in the post-truth arena for a long time where echo chambers of both social and older media subsequently lead to the manipulation of voters. In this post-truth era of politics, it has increasingly become difficult to distinguish between objective facts and constructed narratives. This in turn is concluded to have realised impacts outside of the virtual environment in this case on the self-reported behaviours of voters. The outcomes of these affordances are that ingroups are created, support can be switched, extreme or hateful views are legitimised and a new brand of conservatism is given credibility. As a result, this study has identified five affordances of Reddit, which include credibility, expressing oneself freely, echoing beliefs, creating membership and the meta-affordance ‘Redpilling’. As a result of analysing posts on common themes using Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA), we conclude that the features enable membership of a community to be rewarded, switched or denied. The study specifically focusses on an exclusive membership community called r/ The_Donald.
The study contributes an insight into the evolution and understanding of affordances as a result of examining the ways in which individuals who were previously members of another political group constructed narratives around switching their support to the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential elections. The aim of the study was to understand the affordances of Reddit, and how the affordances of Reddit through various features of the platform lead to outcomes, specifically those relating to political loyalty and the creation of political narratives. This paper examines the affordances of Reddit, a digital media platform where Users share and discuss content.
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