Introducing this year's Keynote Speaker:
Anabel Quan-Haase is Professor of Information and Media Studies and Sociology as well as the Director of the SocioDigital Media Lab at Western University. Her PhD is from the Faculty of Information Studies (now iSchool), University of Toronto. She engages in interdisciplinarity, knowledge transfer, and public outreach. Her focus is on social change, social media, and social networks. Through her policy work she has cooperated with the Benton Foundation, Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Canada’s Digital Policy Forum. She is the author of Technology and Society (Oxford University Press, 2016), co-editor of the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods with Luke Sloan (Sage, 2017) and co-author of Real-Life Sociology with Lorne Tepperman (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is the author of over 50 articles, proceedings, and book chapters and has presented over 100 papers at conferences. Her work has appeared in top journals of the field including New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), The Information Society, Journal of Documentation, Information Research, Big Data + Society, and Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. She is past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) and a council member of the Communication, Information, Technology, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association.
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Her Topic for this year's conference is:
RTs, @s, & Likes: Examining Engagement and Participation in Social Media through the Lens of Affordances
The concept of affordances can provide a framework for better understanding engagement and participation in social media. There is, however, no universal definition of affordances and much debate surrounds its conceptualization. Some understandings of affordances look at general features such as personalization, while other approaches look at specific interaction features such as retweets. This presentation first provides a brief historical overview of the affordances concept. It then shows how combining previous approaches to the study of affordances can help examine user engagement and participation in social media. Three studies are presented that draw on the affordance framework to shed light on user preferences and gratifications. Each study adds to our understanding of the affordance concept and provides guidelines for designers of social media and digital media more generally. The key contribution of this research is to better understand how users make choices around what social media to join. The research also examines what gratifications (e.g., social, entertainment) help explain why users continue using a site over time (e.g., to check timeline, tweet)—that is, this research helps explain the stickiness question through the lens of affordances. The presentation ends with a critical examination of the affordance concept and discussion of future research.
RTs, @s, & Likes: Examining Engagement and Participation in Social Media through the Lens of Affordances
The concept of affordances can provide a framework for better understanding engagement and participation in social media. There is, however, no universal definition of affordances and much debate surrounds its conceptualization. Some understandings of affordances look at general features such as personalization, while other approaches look at specific interaction features such as retweets. This presentation first provides a brief historical overview of the affordances concept. It then shows how combining previous approaches to the study of affordances can help examine user engagement and participation in social media. Three studies are presented that draw on the affordance framework to shed light on user preferences and gratifications. Each study adds to our understanding of the affordance concept and provides guidelines for designers of social media and digital media more generally. The key contribution of this research is to better understand how users make choices around what social media to join. The research also examines what gratifications (e.g., social, entertainment) help explain why users continue using a site over time (e.g., to check timeline, tweet)—that is, this research helps explain the stickiness question through the lens of affordances. The presentation ends with a critical examination of the affordance concept and discussion of future research.