Platforms, People, and Perception: Using Affordances to Understand Self-Presentation on Social Media
Abstract
The popularity of social media platforms today makes them an important venue for self-presentation, but the unique affordances of these platforms challenge our existing models for understanding self-presentation behavior. In particular, social media provide multiple platforms on which the self may be presented, expand the role other individuals can play in one's own self-presentation, and expand the audience while often simultaneously providing less information about who is in that audience. This paper presents an affordance-based approach to self-presentation on social media platforms rooted in these three challenges and presents a systematic taxonomy for considering aspects of platforms that affect self-presentation. Results from an exploratory study of 193 users suggest significant variation in user perception of our proposed affordances across social media platforms, participant experience levels, and participant personality traits.
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Engaging with externally stored information can lead individuals to change their views about themselves and maybe even to modify their behavior.
“Ultimately, this can lead individuals to change their views about themselves (DeVito et al., 2017) and maybe even to modify their behavior (Isaacs et al., 2013;Kersten-van Dijk et al., 2017).”
From Understanding Autobiographical Memory in the Digital Age: The AMEDIA-Model (2024) · cites this paper as DeVito et al., 2017
Cites
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“Thus, context is reduced or disappears, optimizing self-presentation situationally becomes difficult, if not impossible [27, 58], and expectations for content privacy become unclear [45].”
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“” This notion of affordance has been used by Ellison and Vitak [16], Treem and Leonardi [57], boyd [8] and others to describe social media specifically, and focus on higher-level characteristics across platforms [16].”
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“The careful consideration of what to share that this imposes on users could lead to a “lowest common denominator” approach to disclosure, as suggested by Hogan [27].”
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Understanding Autobiographical Memory in the Digital Age: The AMEDIA-Model
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- Authors
- DeVito, M. A., Birnholtz, J., & Hancock, J. T.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2017-02-25
- Pages
- 740-754
- OpenAlex
- W2589056603
- Cited by
- 227
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 38 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 30 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 15 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 10.16
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Impact of Technology on Adolescents
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Keywords
- self-presentation, social networking sites, affordances, platform affordances, audience, user perception, personality traits, user experience
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