Applying Davis & Chouinard's Affordance Theory to Twitter’s Thread Feature.

Summary of Paper

Davis and Chouinard’s paper "Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse" defines affordance as a variable process that mediates between an artifact’s features and outcomes. Features are properties of an artifact and outcomes are what subjects do with these properties. Features and outcomes are binary - they can either be there or not there. But affordances operate through gradations.

The authors propose the following mechanisms via which the affordances operate - request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow. There are no hard and fast boundaries between these mechanisms; an artifact can only mildly allow turning the mechanism into discouragement.

We can evaluate an affordance’s value using Perception, Dexterity and Cultural and Institutional Legitimacy.

1. Perception refers to how much a subject knows about the artifact’s feature.
2. Dexterity is about what a subject can do with the artifact.
3. Cultural, Historical, and Institutional Legitimacy capture the social and structural embeddedness of the affordance.

Loosely speaking, how an affordance fares depends not only on the subject’s abilities but also on her location in society’s structure.

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Let us consider Twitter’s Thread feature. This feature is a binary; a year ago it was not available. Twitter refused the users from tweeting long texts. Users found ways to cheat by composing long texts as replies to their tweets, thereby getting over Twitter’s refusal. So, Twitter introduced the Thread feature and allowed users to make tweetstorms. Since the thread option is seen as a small button whenever we compose tweets, we can consider that Twitter mildly encourages users to use the thread feature. One reason for this encouragement could be that threads offer users to explain their ideas more clearly and avoid any scope of misinterpretation. Once you press the thread button, you are demanded to write text in a new dialog box, else you will be refused from posting your initial tweet.

Twitter encouraging threads for business here

Twitter demands you to write text. You are refused from posting your initial tweet unless you fill in the second box.

A user has to know that this feature is available if she has to use it. Since Twitter has advertised this feature well by promoting tweetstorms of prominent users, we can expect a frequent user to know this feature. Also, a user must have enough skill to recognize the thread button and have enough content to post in two or more tweets. If a user follows a lot of journalists, she would be encouraged to tweet in threads as journalists extensively use this feature. If she is part of the old school Twitter culture that demands a rollback of the thread feature and enforcement of 140 character limit, or if she hates to read giant blobs of text, she would never use this feature. There are some countries wherein Twitter hasn’t released this feature yet. She may not be able to use this feature if she belongs to such countries.

Hence, an affordance’s value depends not only on the network and culture the user is part of, but also the physical environment the user is in.