This study conceptualises latent communicative figurations, which are quasi-visible relational structures formed through social media affordances, for example as provided by partnership advertisement systems. We argue that latent communicative figurations are facilitated by platform affordances that enable the curation of visibility, allowing actors to form latent ties for mobilising partners to create and publish social media content that serve specific strategic interests. A systematic approach is proposed to map the positionality of two types of actors - partners (investors) and pages - who contribute to latent communicative figurations, situated between platform designers and the broader networked publics. A sample of branded Facebook posts related to renewable energy is used to construct four bi-partite networks, revealing the structure of latent relations and dominant actors within them. The results show the emergence of a primarily organisational and professional set of latent ties, which mobilises public reactions surrounding renewable energy. The results evidence a dual process of deinstitutionalisation and reinstitutionalisation where actors such as news media transition from their conventional roles to those that are demanded by profit-driven platform logics. The tensions inherent in this transition - where actors must balance the expectations of strategic partners against the public interest - reveal the fundamental antagonisms within networked social environments.

This qualitative study examines recent cultural changes on WeChat resulting from the interplay between the platform, users, and Chinese culture. Employing a three-dimensional theoretical framework of cultural affordances, the research investigates the dynamics of cultural transformations within the WeChat ecosystem. Data collection involves 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews, follow-up discussions, and observations, analyzed using the grounded theory approach. Four main cultural shifts are identified: a transition from a personal and intimate culture to a more formal and professional one, an increased emphasis on immediate satisfaction and rewards, the emergence of an "everything-looks-fine" culture, and a reinforced high-context culture for self-presentation. The study also discusses the influential roles played by the platform, users, and cultural norms in shaping cultural change on WeChat.

This qualitative study investigates embedded values within WeChat, employing a three-dimensional theoretical framework of cultural affordances. This study involved 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews, follow-up discussions, and observations, with data analysis following the grounded theory approach. The findings highlight the presence of embedded values manifested in WeChat's design features, including offline status omission, mutual likes notification on Friends' Circle, the absence of deletion notification, information symmetry, and the absence of read receipts. These design choices reflect the cultural affordances of WeChat that shape user experiences on the platform. The study also discusses users' responses to these design features and explores their ethical implications. Ultimately, it proposes potential directions for further research in this domain. By uncovering the embedded values of WeChat, this study provides insights into the interplay between technology, culture, and user behavior, offering valuable implications for researchers and practitioners in social media studies.

Current literature on networked publics lacks research that examines how emotions are mobilised around specific actors, and quantitative analysis of affective phenomena is limited to vanity metrics. We address this issue by developing a network analytic routine, which guides the attribution of emotions contained in hashtagged tweets to their sources and targets. The proposed template enables identification of networked inconsequentiality (i.e., inability to trigger dialogue), reply targets (i.e., individuals targeted in replies) and voice agents (i.e., senders of replicated utterances). We demonstrate this approach with two data sets based on the hashtags #Newzealand (n = 131,523) and #SriLanka (n = 145,868) covering two major incidents of terrorism related to opposing extremist ideologies. In addition to the methodological contribution, the study demonstrates that user-driven emergence of networked leadership takes place based on conventional structures of power in which individuals with high power and social status are likely to emerge as targets as well as sources of emotions.

This study proposes a framework for examining hashtagged content on social media, which captures how specific issue frames (i.e. hashtags) contribute to navigable structures. We introduce 'interwoven multimodal discourse' as a pluralist alternative to the widely applied unitary approach in which trending hashtags serve as primary sites of analysis. The study argues that 'interweaving' of social media discourse takes place through practices such as hashtag colocation, which result in ambient and navigable structures. Analysis of hashtag colocation networks can serve as an approach for mapping ambient affiliations accessible through such structures. We analyse a hashtag colocation network constructed using a sample of 1100 Instagram posts related to climate change uploaded during the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2021 (COP26) held in Glasgow to demonstrate two structural properties of interwoven discourse on Instagram: (1) hashtags contribute to multiple thematic clusters and (2) micro-level hashtags representing secondary topics are nested within larger thematic clusters.

This paper proposes a novel framework called ‘cultural affordances’ to examine the dynamic interplay among technology, users and culture, as multilevel and multidirectional interactive networks. The framework includes three dimensions. 1) Cultural affordances of technology describe what technology can offer users and culture in terms of behavioural or cultural changes. 2) Cultural affordances of users describe what users can offer other users, technology and culture in terms of behavioural, technological or cultural changes. 3) Affordances of the cultural describe what culture can offer users and technology in terms of the design and use of technology as well as related changes. To establish the need for a culturally oriented extension to affordance theory, we first revisit Gibson's original definition of affordances of the environment and discuss its significance and limitations, including the need to understand the interplay between technology and users in the digital era. We contend that culture, as an assemblage of all relations and practices, should be included as an indispensable part of affordance theory, and we provide a detailed explanation of the novel, three-dimensional framework of cultural affordances. We then apply the framework to three prior empirical studies and one ongoing study to demonstrate how the framework can be used as an analytic tool to deepen our understanding of the multilevel and multidirectional interplay among technology, users and culture, and we identify related changes, focusing on WeChat. We also discuss how the framework can provide directions for designing new technologies to improve collaborations among users, between users and designers, and between an online platform and the offline world.

This study presents qualitative research of the interaction among WeChat, users, and Chinese culture by applying a three-dimensional notion of cultural affordances. The data is collected by conducting 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews, follow-up discussions, and observations, and is analyzed via the grounded theory approach. The study provides preliminary findings that demonstrate the roles of WeChat, users, and Chinese culture in terms of cultural and technological changes. The study also discusses the interactive patterns among three dimensions of cultural affordances and offers possible direction for further study.

What would be a good system to explain short-form videos holistically? Building on a previous method paper (multimodal analysis), this paper outlines the following arguments. Short-form videos are in part a theatrical and dramatic medium; hence we present a performative analysis that draws on concepts from these fields. Creators of short-form videos use the affordances of multiple modes (audio, textual, spatial, etc.) to achieve theatrical devices such as situation, suspense, and mimesis; hence we present a multimodal analysis of affordances. Bridging modes and these theatrical devices, affordances are multi-layered: the outcomes of affordances at one level become affordances at a new level. In particular, audiencing is achieved through situation, suspense and mimesis.

Mobile money (MM) is the most promising tool to enable more individuals living in rural and marginalized communities into the banking sector. Although private companies in some developing countries have transitioned most of its users over to MM, it remains unclear if government-initiated programs would be as successful. By accessing a comprehensive data set of the first MM project to be initiated by a government, we tracked the behavior of users within the MM network. Temporal analysis of network representations of MM transactions shows how agents behave over time and how they react when given tax-incentives for the use of non-cash transactions. Tax-incentives had immediate positive effects on the economic activity of continuing users (number of transactions, mean and total value of transactions) and a marginal effect on their interconnectedness (number of partners and clustering). However, the tax-incentive distorted economic behavior and had a modest effect on the adoption and diffusion of MM over time at a high price tag. Implementation of these new technologies requires consideration of the peculiarity of the different actors and the expansion of the network over time, as well as the specific characteristics of each economy. These findings offer important lessons that would be valuable to other governments and policymakers considering MM.

This paper first reviews the development and application of affordances theory in the field of social media studies. Then, it examines the significance and limitations of the original meaning of affordances of the environment that is provided by American psychologist James Gibson. The paper argues that the cultural aspect of affordances has been understated and should be included as part of affordances theory. To enrich theoretical understanding of affordances and further facilitate empirical studies of social media affordances, the paper offers a novel definition of cultural affordances that bridges cultural studies and social media studies. The new definition of cultural affordances includes two layers, which are cultural affordances of technology and affordances of the cultural. Later, the paper provides examples to showcase how this novel definition can be applied in prior empirical studies with a focus on WeChat.

Many studies focus on utterances included within specific hashtags. This approach does not adequately acknowledge the fact that social media discourse is distributed across a wide range of hashtags. To assess such ‘width of discourse’, we examine the extent to which dominant hashtags in the UK Covid-19 Instagram discourse connect with hashtags related to different aspects of social life. A network of Instagram hashtags (31,742 nodes and 107,367 edges) constructed using #nhsheroes, #captaintommoore, and #carehomes as key access points was analysed. Results showed that top nodes in the network representing these and other topics related to the pandemic are highly intertwined. Moreover, results revealed that despite connections among each other, hubs in this network tend to connect more with low degree frames, connecting secondary hashtags to the Covid-19 searchable discourse. Results revealed that a diverse set of local structures consisting of secondary frames are nested within pandemic related communities.

Social Networking Platforms can provide a public space for the formation and engagement of global transnational networks. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the unique "virtual wa'a (canoe)" community engagement model developed and utilized by the Polynesian Voyaging Society during the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage. Through the use of social network analysis, community detection and text analysis, this study examines the function of the Hōkūle'a Crew Facebook Page as a transnational public during the voyage, as well as the formation of smaller engaged communities within the global online network during the voyage. The sheer volume of actions and the overall positive affect in the liking and commenting centered on the Hōkūle'a Crew Facebook Page appears to be connected to the movements of Hōkūle'a and significant events that occurred throughout the voyage. The initial findings of this research support the Polynesian Voyaging Society's use of a "virtual wa'a" to engage individuals, organizations, and communities on a global level, and the ability of the virtual wa'a to serve as a transnational public for community engagement.

Previous studies indicate mixed results as to whether social media constitutes ideological echo chambers. This inconsistency may arise due to a lack of theoretical frames that acknowledge the fact that contextual and technological factors allow varying levels of cross-cutting exposure on social media. This study suggests an alternative theoretical lens, divergence of exposure - co-existence of user groups with varying degrees of cross-ideology exposure related to the same issue - as a notion that serves as an overarching perspective. We suggest that mediated spaces, such as social media groups, can serve as enclaves of exposure that offer affordances for formation of user groups irrespective of offline social distinctions. Yet social elements cause some of them to display more cross-ideology exchange than others. To establish this claim empirically, we examine two Facebook page user networks ( 'Sri Lanka's Killing Fields' and 'Sri Lankans Hate Channel 4') that emerged in response to Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, a controversial documentary broadcast by Channel 4 that accused Sri Lankan armed forces of human rights violation during the final stage of the separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. The results showed that the Facebook group network that supported the claims made by Channel 4 is more diverse in terms of ethnic composition, and is neither assortative nor disassortative across ethnicity, suggesting the presence of cross-ethnicity interaction. The pro-allegiant group was largely homogenous and less active, resembling a passive echo chamber. 'Social mediation' repurposes enclaves of exposure to represent polarized ideologies where some venues display cross-ideology exposure, while others resemble an 'echo chamber'. (C) 2018 Western Social Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) recently adapted its self-regulatory notice-and-choice program to the mobile environment by creating a mobile version of its existing opt-out webpage and a new mobile app. Its AdChoices icon remains the primary means on the mobile Web of alerting consumers to the presence of behaviorally-targeted advertising. Previous research has uncovered major usability flaws in the desktop versions, so evaluating the mobile tools is prudent. Mobile devices also present unique usability challenges and afford greater opportunity for tracking consumers. A qualitative study was conducted in which participants (n=18) were given test smartphones and asked to complete three tasks corresponding to the AdChoices icon, webpage, and app. Major usability problems were found that could impact a user's mental model of how these tools work, and the extent to which their privacy is protected. This paper presents findings from the first usability task about the AdChoices icon.

Learning in Digital and Social Media is an interdisciplinary minitrack to present research on how human learning takes place via interactive and social processes enabled or supported by digital and social media.We seek to bridge disciplines and research communities between system and learning sciences, and within this scope a broad range of research questions, learning settings, and theoretical and methodological traditions are discussed.The shared focus is on relationships between human activities and the technologies and analytics used to support and enable learning.This year the Learning in Digital and Social Media minitrack consists of three highly valued papers.Each of these papers successfully address complex methodological challenges of researching learning through social interaction in digital and social media and present innovative designs for learning.The first paper, presented by Jean-Éric Pelet and Somayeh Zamani with the title "When Engagement in Course-Related Social Media Leads to Better Course Self-Efficacy", discusses the impact of social media participation on classroom learning.The study presented in this paper seeks to find out why students engage in course-related social media groups (for example WhatsAPP, Telegram, Facebook and LinkedIn) and how the social media engagement of silent students can mediate their self-efficacy.The study proposes and tests a model for increasing selfefficacy through engagement in course-related social media groups.The findings show that social media engagement positively affects self-efficacy and mediates the negative effect of students' selective mutism.The authors discuss practical implications for learning design in order to encourage student participation in online groups and social media.The second paper, presented by Susan Gasson and James Waters, is called "Participation Solicitation Design for Learner Engagement with Epistemic Objects and Situated, Collective Learning in Online Discussion Boards".This paper focuses on how we may design effective affordances for contextuallyand socially-situated learning in professional domain courses mediated via digital technologies.To do so, the study distinguishes between online learning