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This paper explores how WhatsApp is domesticated in a Brazilian apartment block and examines its productivity for vicinal interactions. The ethnography reveals how the uses and appropriations of the platform reconfigure spatialities and temporalities, shaping collective living in the Digital Era.

Paper long abstract

In the Brazilian context, chat groups operating on WhatsApp are widely popular in apartment blocks and shape their neighbourhood practices. The so-called “grupo de condomínio” (in Portuguese) circulate information and are also used to organise gatherings among neighbours and their pets, facilitate the sale of products, recommend services, provide assistance in emergency situations, discuss internal politics, and collect donations. Drawing on an ethnography conducted in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, this paper discusses the domestication of WhatsApp in a residential space and how it co-produces sociality and materialities. The fieldwork was carried out in a block referred to as the Ipês Residential Block, which comprises 438 quitinetes (studio flats) inhabited predominantly by the Brazilian middle strata. The multimodal fieldwork lasted 18 months and combined participant observation, 38 semi-structured interviews, photographic documentation of the flats, and engagement with the block’s digital artefacts, particularly four WhatsApp groups and one broadcast list. The study examines the platform’s affordances and discusses its productivity for collective life. The fieldwork reveals how the uses and appropriations of WhatsApp both reflect values, moralities, and normativities and produce new temporalities and spatialities. They institute particular forms of communication and meaning-making by scaling up both the volume and the rhythm of interactions, complicating social relations. The apartment block also experiences an expansion of its boundaries, becoming “portable” and “mobile”, accessible remotely through smartphones. The ethnography sheds light on neighbourhood practices in the Digital Era and offers a potent comparative basis for studies of vicinity and digitalisation.

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Drawing on ethnographic research among farmers and agtech developers working in the rural US South, this presentation examines some of the affordances of smart farming technologies, focusing on the modes of identification and socialization that such technologies both enable and constrain.

Paper long abstract

Digital technologies are rapidly changing the work of farming and what it means to be a farmer. The integration of sensors that track changes in variables like temperature, humidity, and soil health with algorithmic data processing technologies has shifted much of the day-to-day work of farm management from the field to the office. Farmers can check an app on their phone to make sure their warehouses are properly cooled and ventilated to mitigate rot and control pests. At the same time, differential access to these expensive sociotechnical systems is contributing to new cleavages in rural communities, where large industrial farms are able to afford expensive automation technologies and smaller family farms are at risk of being left (even further) behind. On one hand, these technologies and their rapid adoption have both emerged from within and contributed a context in which the unequal power relationships between farm owners and farmworkers is becoming even more unequal and in which industrial agriculture is becoming even more extractivist. On the other hand, these technologies encourage the cultivation of new relationships (between farm managers and researchers, for instance) and new ways of sensing and engaging with plants, animals, and the environment, opening a political space in which new multi-species worlds (and worldings) might emerge. Drawing on ethnographic research among farmers and agtech developers working in the rural US South, this presentation examines some of the affordances of smart farming technologies, focusing on the modes of identification and socialization that such technologies both enable and constrain.

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Drawing on media anthropology in Morocco’s High Atlas, this paper asks: What must affordances presuppose? Ethnographic analysis of a technology learning space reveals how digital tools require pedagogical and infrastructural work that participatory design methodologies often render invisible.

Paper long abstract

Digital anthropologists have extended Gibson's concept of affordance to examine how technological design and social practice co-produce possibilities and constraints of digital life. Building on insights that affordances are relational and enacted through practice, this paper foregrounds a dimension requiring further attention: the infrastructural and pedagogical conditions through which affordances become accessible.

Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork within an interdisciplinary research project between anthropology and HCI, I examine a technology learning intervention in Morocco's High Atlas. The project introduced digital tools—laptops, cameras, recording equipment—into an NGO's educational infrastructure, following participatory design principles aimed at enabling self-directed technology learning. Media ethnographic attention to everyday practices revealed fundamental tensions: while the intervention promised democratized access through "maker" pedagogies, participants often lacked prerequisite literacies—mouse operation, file management, typing. The space's integration into the NGO's tutoring program illuminated which affordances mattered within local socio-economic priorities and what practical work enables technological appropriation.

I argue that affordances are unevenly infrastructured: they presuppose chains of prior affordances that are unequally distributed—skills, bodily competencies, epistemic frameworks, material resources. This infrastructural stratification becomes analytically visible where "the digital" has not yet naturalized as a distinct sphere. Participatory methodologies, despite reflexive intentions, risk obscuring these conditions by treating learning as individual agency rather than collective infrastructural achievement.

By focussing on what affordances presuppose rather than what they promise, this paper contributes to debates on digital mediation in polarizing contexts, showing how well-intentioned interventions may inadvertently uphold asymmetries they seek to overcome.

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Focusing on older Parisians with limited connectivity, this paper examines digital affordances and introduces “digital shrinkage” to describe how expanding digital infrastructures can contract everyday possibilities in later life.

Paper long abstract

In Paris, as elsewhere, digital technologies have become deeply embedded in almost every domain of social life. Access to public and private goods and services - from banking and healthcare to public administration - as well as interpersonal communication, has increasingly shifted online. While this transformation creates new possibilities for autonomy, connection, and participation for some, it also generates new forms of exclusion, particularly for those lacking adequate equipment, connectivity, or digital skills.

This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted during my PhD with Parisians aged 75 and older who were minimally connected, or not connected at all, to the internet. It examines how these interlocutors experience the digitalization of everyday life through the analytical lens of digital affordances, with particular attention to their contraction. Building on Dokumacı’s concept of “shrinkage of affordances,” developed in the context of disability to describe how environments progressively limit possible actions for certain bodies (Dokumacı, 2023), I extend this framework to the field of digital ageing.

I propose the notion of “digital shrinkage” to describe how the growing integration of digital infrastructures into ordinary environments may contract affordances for older adults with limited connectivity. As digital technologies multiply opportunities for connected users, they can simultaneously narrow the scope of action, autonomy, and participation for those who remain partially or fully disconnected.

The paper invites a reconsideration of digital affordances from the perspective of those for whom they increasingly recede rather than expand.

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This paper explores “sleeping in VR” as an emergent socio-cultural practice in social virtual reality. Drawing on VRChat ethnography, it shows how users collectively rework technical constraints to cultivate co-presence, intimacy, trust, and embodied connection through sleep.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how sleep becomes a socio-cultural practice within social virtual reality (SVR)—multi-user environments where participants inhabit avatars to interact through embodied co-presence. Drawing on digital ethnography within VRChat, a popular SVR platform, the paper develops a case study of “sleeping in VR” as an emergent practice that foregrounds the relational and contested nature of digital affordances.

Building on debates around affordances, the paper distinguishes between two interconnected senses: socio-cultural affordances, which emerge through shared norms, language, and practices, and technical affordances, which arise from material and design constraints. Sleeping in VR is neither natural nor self-evident in virtual environments, but instead emerges as a situated practice. Despite technical features that actively discourage sleep, such as headset discomfort, constant light exposure, and persistent connectivity, users actively rework these constraints, enduring physical discomfort to cultivate co-presence, intimacy, and a sense of safety.

Ethnographic accounts describe sleep through carefully staged and socially negotiated practices such as avatar mirroring, virtual cuddling, and the management of trust. These practices reveal how embodiment remains central in virtual worlds, even in the absence of touch. VR sleep becomes a counter to experiences of isolation, anxiety, or marginalisation offline.

This paper argues that affordances in VR are actively produced: users adapt technologies, endure discomfort, and reconfigure environments to make new practices possible. Ultimately, sleeping in VR demonstrates how users collectively transform technological disinvitations into meaningful, embodied practices, reframing sleep not as a purely biological act but as a socially and technically mediated one.

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Examining Adivasi (Indigenous) media in Jharkhand, India, this paper analyzes how digital affordances enable "visual sovereignty" while reinforcing algorithmic exclusion. It frames digital sociality as a struggle for Indigenous future-making against state narratives and extractivist erasure.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ambivalent affordances of digital media in the Indigenous (Adivasi) territories of Jharkhand, India, where the “technoscape” serves both as a site of decolonial resistance and as a mechanism of digital colonialism. Drawing on multimodal ethnography with the Akhra Collective and the Adivasi Lives Matter (ALM) network, I analyze how Adivasi creators navigate a polarized media ecology defined by state erasure and corporate extraction.

I argue that digital platforms afford Adivasi communities a "visual sovereignty" (Raheja 2010)—allowing for the circulation of counter-narratives that challenge the state’s depiction of Adivasis as "primitive" impediments to development. Specifically, I trace how creators use features such as geotagging and hashtags (e.g., #AdivasiTech) to document deforestation and assert land rights, effectively hacking algorithms to render Indigenous epistemologies visible.

However, these affordances are fraught with polarization. The same algorithmic architectures that permit visibility also enact "technological containment," where Indigenous content is throttled or demonetized under the logic of surveillance capitalism (Couldry and Mejias 2019). Furthermore, state-sponsored media initiatives utilize these platforms to co-opt Adivasi identity, creating a fractured digital sociality. By analyzing these tensions, this paper demonstrates that for Adivasi communities, digital affordances are not merely technical features but political battlegrounds. Ultimately, I propose a framework of "relational media literacy," where Indigenous kinship networks repurpose digital tools to build transnational solidarity and envision pluriversal futures beyond the binary of the nation-state.

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By ethnographically interacting with a range of Large Language Models, this paper introduces the concept of “synthetic extremism” to critically analyse the cultures of contentious exchange afforded by artificial intelligence (AI).

Paper long abstract

This paper introduces the concept of “synthetic extremism” to critically analyse the cultures of contentious exchange afforded by artificial intelligence (AI). Famously, affordance theory describes the social outcomes a technological artefact allows, for better or worse (Gibson, 1986). In relation to digital media, the concept of affordances has been widely critiqued as relational to human subjectivities and cultural setting (Davis, 2018), and in co-dependence with adjacent actant technologies (Hopkins, 2017). These theoretical evolutions, however, do not consider the complexities of affordances in relation to AI.

By ethnographically interacting with a range of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot assistants, including major services such as ChatGPT, but also fringe products (Gab.ai), the paper aims to make three critical interventions to broaden the conceptualisation of the term "extreme speech” (Pohjonen & Udupa, 2017; Udupa & Pohjonen, 2019). First, synthetic extremism acknowledges the post-human affordance of extreme content online thereby problematising assumptions about what is speech in the first place. Second, the LLM’s that produce synthetic extremism inhabit a broader assemblage of digital technologies, situating extremity afforded by AI in the wider ecology of platform capitalism. Third, synthetic extremism is manufactured in collusion with user data, demonstrating how extremity is a non-homogenous phenomena, but afforded preferentially reflecting user body politic including age, class, ethnicity and gender. Given the proliferation of LLM's across global digital cultures, the article suggests more critical research on the relationship between AI and extremism is a matter of urgency, and aims to provide a framework for further analysis.

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“Affordances” is often used to explain platform effects by positing pre-given action possibilities instead of tracing how people learn, contest, and moralise what technologies make doable in practice. I critique and typify these uses, then highlight more disciplined deployments.

Paper long abstract

Affordance has become a convenient term for describing what digital environments “allow” or “prevent.” In digital anthropology, it often bridges technological design and lived sociality: likes, feeds, moderation tools, or VR embodiment are taken to open some relationalities while foreclosing others. This paper examines how affordance talk travels in ethnographic accounts of mediated interaction, and what analytical work the concept is made to do.

I argue that many uses of “affordance,” including revisions that stress enactment or contestation, rely on an analyst-defined “possibility space” that substitutes for describing how technologies become consequential in practice. These accounts commonly presume recognisability (“what the medium affords”), treat features as causally sufficient, and compress the situated work through which possibilities are made real: instruction, imitation, troubleshooting, demonstration, narrative, sanction, and moral evaluation. I typify recurring patterns in these imports and show how conceptual “repairs” are used to preserve affordance talk while loosening commitments to situated sensemaking.

I then spotlight more successful cases that take affordance theory seriously and treat its implications as substantive commitments requiring explicit theorisation. Drawing on Terra Edwards’ The Medium of Intersubjectivity and Goodwin’s co-operative action framework, I show how material and ecological conditions can be analysed without bypassing the local accomplishment of meaning and action. I close by proposing a disciplined stance for anthropological use: affordance claims should be warranted by the observable practices through which possibilities are learned, circulated, and contested, and by the infrastructures and institutions that condition those practices.