Identifying Affordances Across Technologies: From Social Media to Social VR

Bree McEwan, University of Toronto - Mississauga

Abstract

An affordances approach is useful for determining how social technologies may influence human interaction via those technologies (Fox and McEwan, 2019). Different forms of presence such as spatial or social presence may constitute perceived social affordances of virtual environments (Fox & McEwan, 2019; Lombard, 1997) However it is important to understand the constellation of affordances of a particular technology, how those affordances are perceived by users of a technology and how affordances work in connection with each other. This talk will overview an affordance-based perspective, McEwan’s work in operationalizing affordances in social media, the application of known affordances to virtual environments, and discuss recent qualitative work with participants engaging in virtual reality experiences to articulate the constellation of affordances that facilitate and/or hinder feelings of presence in social virtual reality spaces.

Bio

Bree McEwan (PhD, Arizona State) is a professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, an associate director in the Data Sciences Institute, and a faculty affiliate of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She is a co-organizer and founder of the Questioning Reality conference, a social VR research incubator. McEwan authored Navigating New Media Networks and co-authored Interpersonal Encounters. She directs the McEwan Mediated Communication Lab which researches the intersection of technology and social interaction. McEwan has published on relational maintenance on social network sites, texting in romantic relationships, linguistic patterns in online communities, and the diffusion of information through social media. In addition, McEwan has metascience interests focused on transparency and replication in the social sciences. Current studies of the McMC Lab focus on affordances of social virtual environments, cognition and heuristics related to learning in VR spaces, and nonverbal communication patterns of avatars and agents.

McEwan is also a Spartan alum, having earned her B.A. in Communication from Michigan State University in May 2003.