Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Don’t Marginalize Me: How Organizations Facilitate Social Injustice Via Social Media

One emerging area in Information Systems scholarship is understanding how social injustices are related to social media use. We conduct a theorizing review to offer a theory of social injustice on social media. We examine the current literature at the intersection of social media and social injustice by using a grounded theory method. Our review will result in a theoretical framework. We illustrate one example from our developing framework with propositions related to how organizations facilitate marginalization. We discuss the contributions and implications of our framework for theory and practice, along with future directions such as offering a research agenda

Carrying forward the Uses and Grats 2.0 agenda: An affordance-driven measure of social media uses and gratifications

Peer-reviewed journal articleThe notion of social media affordances has not been fully integrated into the uses and gratifications literature. Building on the MAIN (modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability) model, this study develops and tests a social media uses and gratifications scale with a sample of 393 college students. Results of the study support the MAIN model, as conceptualizing social media uses and gratifications as a second-order factor structure with 4 different types of affordances displays similar goodness-of-fit to a single-order factor structure. A confirmatory factor analysis with a second sample of 313 adults further confirms the applicability of the scale among the general population

Contextual Affordances of Social Media, Clinical Prosess Changes and Health Service Outcomes

Never had consumers been empowered by information technologies such as social media-enabled portals that permit them to access and conduct all aspects of life and work activities through a mobile phone at any time from anywhere. WeChat, with over 963 million active monthly users, represents such a revolutionary platform. In healthcare, patients can use WeChat to make doctor appointments, access health and lab results, consult with doctors, and check on the queuing status and parking conditions in the health clinics and hospitals. Such social-media-enabled systems have transformed the relationships between consumers and businesses into a new paradigm in which the supply-side is driven by the demand-side. As a result, the new technology is fundamentally changing; not only the context in which business is conducted but also the business itself. The extant literature on technology acceptance, however, has mostly focused on technical functionalities and user characteristics without adequately considering the specific context in which the technology is used. Although these affordance concepts have advanced our knowledge about the interactions between technology and users, the specific contexts in which such interactions occur have been largely ignored. There is a critical literature gap that hinders our ability to understand and provide guidelines to help organizations deal with the complex challenges they face in managing social mediaenabled technologies in today’s changing environment. Our research attempts to bridge this critical literature gap by conceptualizing the concept of contextual affordance, and by examining its determinants and consequences in healthcare services. We use a combination of qualitative method and quantitative method. Research sites are in China across multiple healthcare facilities. The anticipated findings include validated dimensions of contextual affordance and relationships between contextual affordance and its determinants and impacts on clinical process changes and health service outcomes. Theoretically, this study extends the current understanding of affordance by considering contextual dimensions of affordance, and by examining the relationships between contextual affordance and its determinants and consequences. Practically, this study sheds new lights on how organizations should go beyond the out-of-context interactions between technologies and users by considering users’ perceived affordance of technology within the specific contexts of use

Social media enabled interactions in healthcare: Towards a taxonomy

Healthcare users and providers increasingly utilize social media to interact with one another. For a future understanding of when and how these interactions supplement or replace offline doctor-patient interactions, it is essential to understand who interacts, about what, and how these interactions can be categorized in a taxonomy. We draw on affordance theory and employ a mixed-methods approach to study social media interactions among healthcare users and providers. We first engage in qualitative content analysis, which is followed by cluster analysis. We identify five archetypal interactions and categorize these in a taxonomy that adds to current literature on how social media is utilized in the healthcare context. We also provide a clear and systematic overview of the interactions in different social media categories that can stimulate future research regarding doctor-patient interactions. Furthermore, we identify a new and distinct type of social media enabled interaction in healthcare, namely lifestyle support, focusing on prevention

Exploring Social Media Affordances in Natural Disaster: Case Study of 2015 Myanmar Flood

Consumers’ willingness to disclose and allow electronic storage of their personal health information (PHI) is critical to the successful digitization of healthcare. However, concern about privacy and potentially negative consequences of privacy loss (e.g., loss of jobs) can discourage PHI disclosure by consumers. It is thus imperative to identify and address key roadblocks from the perspective of consumers that may impede the progress of developing countries in digitizing healthcare. Toward this end, this research-in-progress integrates the privacy calculus model with procedural justice to investigate the willingness of individuals in developing countries to disclose PHI in order to receive care in contexts where the disclosed PHI is stored and used electronically. A comprehensive model is proposed to explain the determinants of consumer PHI privacy concerns and willingness to disclose PHI. We will test the proposed model using the survey method. Several theoretical contributions expected from the study are provided