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Final Essay for New Media Theory (grade in 8.6)
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The essay used affordances as the main theory, coping with surveillance and panopticon, to analyse a platform.
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How can we understand Lofter from the perspective of affordances and surveillances?Abstract
This essay will focus on Lofter, a social media in China. By explaining the exact function and feature
of Lofter, theory of affordances will be applied to help with the analysis of what are the affordance of
App. Also, it will descibe under what circumstances can people use the affordances of the platform
based on Davis and Chouinard’s article, Theorizing affordances: From request to refuse. In the
second part, how Lofter can control over its users will be discussed. This control will be separated
into surveillance (related to panopticon), and how algorithms can help with a softer control
(continuously changing with the change of users’ behaviour).
Keywords: Lofter, Affordances, Surveillance, Panopticon
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,Introduction
With the dramatic growth of new media in contemporary society, social media platforms have been
created and are wildly used in the world. Since the Chinese government banned Twitter, Facebook,
Tumblr and other social media in Mainland China, some Chinese companies produced similar apps or
websites as substitutions. In China, Weibo can be regarded as Chinse Twitter; Tencent QQ can
substitute Facebook; and "Lofter (http://www.lofter.com/), established in 2011, is similar in form to
Tumblr, and has become the most popular platform in the PRC for fans to create and consume fan
fiction and fan art" (Ng and Li 491). Feng and Literate (2587) also named it a "blogging community".
Many fans utilise this App as a platform to find people who have the same interests (like the same
celebrity, fascinated in a movie or book, Etc.) with them. By doing this, they can follow certain tags;
post paintings, fan fictions and fanvids; and also comment and give likes. Users are "creating content
and sharing with others who have some social connections with them" (Yan et al. 81). Therefore, Lofter
involves highly user-generated contents. While Lofter made lots of activities available for fans, it also
continuously takes down particular posts and annoyed many content creators. It indicated that media
surveillance also exists among this platform which constrains users from sharing information. This
essay will provide more in-depth analysis by applying two theories, affordances and surveillance, to
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, this example.
Aspects of understanding affordances of Lofter
The original definition of affordance was raised by Gibson, which connects to ecological psychology.
David and Chouinard stated that it refers to what the environment "offers to animal, what it provides
or furnishes, either for good or ill" (241). In other words, affordances are what animals can do in a
particular environment. Later on, the concept of affordance has been divided into several different
aspects, including conceptualising affordances, perceived affordances, technology affordances, and so
on (Bucher and Helmond).
This essay will focus on a general meaning of affordance, which according to Davis and Chouinard,
"affordance refers to the range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon,
structurally situated subjects" (241). It allows a specific type of interaction between people and objects
and leads people to a certain kind of communication. The authors also suggested three conditions of
affordances, which are "perception, dexterity and cultural and institutional legitimacy" (245).
Perception refers to whether a person knows that the affordance of an object or artefact exits or not.
Davis and Chouinard claimed that the functions or features of an artefact are only available when a
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