Paper short abstract:

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with anti-government activists in Sri Lanka, the "Folklore Affordance Framework" demonstrates that to get closer to better comprehending social media algorithms it is time to see their technological affordances as a repertoire of algorithmic folklore.

Paper long abstract:

For fifteen years, the correlation between a social media’s design architecture and the social outcomes they offer has been framed in the language of affordances (boyd, 2010; Hopkins, 2019), and platforms are broadly recognised as affording outcomes relational to user subjectivity (Miller & Madianou, 2013; Costa, 2018). However, affordance studies have yet to make sense of how algorithms shape the social world because they are notoriously opaque, raising questions about how to approach them ethnographically.

In this article, I argue that to get closer to better comprehending social media algorithms it is time to see their technological affordances as a repertoire of algorithmic folklore (Bishop, 2019). Algorithmic folklore are the “beliefs and narratives [about social media algorithms] that are passed on informally and can exist in tension with official accounts” (Savolainen, 2022, 1092). Ethnographically, I draw on my long-term fieldwork with anti-government activists in Sri Lanka, and the tensions that emerge around how activists try to “game the algorithm” and maximise their visibility, whilst maintaining their credibility and safety.

I introduce the Folklore Affordance Framework to identify the functionalities of discrete platform design features, and to recognise how affordances operate in (and out of) practice via a collection of folkloric responses to the opaqueness of platform operations. The paper will demonstrate how folkloric affordances are not only a useful heuristic device for analysing the gaps between what platforms’ afford and what users think platforms’ afford, but how affordance folklore materialises as actionable outcomes against “black-box gaslighting” (Cotter, 2023).