Janet Murray talks about four properties that are representative of digital artifacts; which are procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic. The objective in creating the best digital artifact possible is accomplished by successfully combining and using these four affordances. I will be using these four affordances of the digital medium in order to compare and contrast Facebook and Snapchat. Facebook is a social media platform that has revolutionized communication and transformed the way we consume and interpret information. Its main goal is to connect people from all over the world and create a closer digital community. Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg and initially intended to just be a social platform for university students. It quickly gained popularity and in 2005 it began to spread worldwide. Snapchat is also a social media platform, but instead of focusing on preserving memories its uniqueness came from the concept of disappearing memories. Snapchat enables users to send and receive images they can only view for a maximum of 10 seconds. Snapchat recognized the dominant social media platforms that took up most of the market, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, they all mainly focused on documenting photos, videos and texts. Snapchat, on the other hand, went towards the opposite direction. It based itself on the real life experience of viewing an image, where you would only see it once and not see it again. A procedural medium is a combination of abstract behaviors. Algorithms are the abstract set of guidelines and instructions programed into the computer system that simulate life like behaviors. “The more possibilities it encompasses the more powerful and widely useful it will be” – Murray. In other words, the more lines of code and more possible outcomes to a problem the more complex the system is. Facebook is a procedural medium because it is composed of algorithms, which are an abstract set of guidelines and instructions programed into the system. From the launch of Facebook, it has undergone many system updates and added more and more features. It is made up of a very complex set of codes that allow for several features to function. Facebooks initial main qualities were the ability to connect with friends, share photos, and browse through a timeline. Now a days Facebook has become the center of our generations social life. It is the medium we use to find out about events, get updated with the latest’s news, and communicate with friends. Snapchat also has procedural qualities; however, they are less complex as those of Facebook. One of Snapchats main hooks was its simplicity and specific functionality. Unlike Facebook that has endless amounts of functions and features, and is constantly adding more and more. Snapchat is essentially a platform where you can send and receive photos and videos that erase as soon as you see them. It has a very specific procedure and interface. Any content on the platform is displayed for no longer than 10 seconds, and texts tend to be no more than a sentence long. “Objects in digital form can have multiple instantiations, existing as identical copies or as a variant examples of a common pattern.”- Murray. Snapchat’s initial concept emulated early stages of television when you could only see something once. Instead of creating something totally new Snapchat based itself on the past. For a digital artifact to be a participatory medium, the relationship between the user and the computer must be a mutually active exchange of commands and responses. “Because the computer is a participatory medium interactors have an expectation that they will be able to manipulate digital artifacts and make things happen in response to their actions.”- Murray. The user should also be able to easily access and find their desired actions on the digital interface, and it’s the digital designers job to insure there is no miscommunication between the user and the computer. Facebook is also a participatory medium because it relies heavily on interaction and user engagement. Facebook’s success was due to its popularity between users and positive responses towards the platform. The user interface is also very user friendly and comfortable to manage and get used to. Users are able to easily navigate the site, and the system responds promptly and efficiently to commands. “A large part of digital design is selecting the appropriate convention to communicate what actions are possible in ways that the human interactor can understand” – Murray. Facebook’s script is also very flexible; it does a good job at presenting recognizable icons that have universal meaning. Its design has a very natural flow, the search bar is at the top left section of the home page, the notifications and setting icons are at the top right, and on the sides one can find trending topics and advertisements. Everything about Facebooks platform is participatory. It allows the user to engage in different ways with the content, you are able to share, like, comment, follow, react, and post. In Affordances of the Digital Medium Murray talks about the status line on Facebook, and points out that due to the narrow design of the status box, it naturally invites users to engage with it and type up a quick response to the generic question “What’s on your mind?” Similarly, to Facebook, Snapchat relies on user participation and engagement. However, Snapchat takes engagement to the next level with small choices that make the platform borderline addictive. For example, if you receive an image from a friend, and open it but decide not to respond, the sender will know you have viewed their image and ignored it. This feature creates a sense of urgency and a need to respond and interact immediately out of fear of offending the sender. Snapchat also offers geotags, and filters which are stamps you can add to your image or video that displays your location, temperature, altitude, and speed. It also allows the user to add specific filters to the selfie, such as dog’s ears, sun glasses, face enhancements, and even face swapping with a friend. The filters keep the app highly interactive and exciting, everyday there are new filters featured on the app, giving users even more incentive to check it daily. Snapchat also recently released a feature called Snapchat Discover, which resembles a traditional newspaper or magazine stand and features media outlets, such as, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan Magazine, People, CNN, National Geographic, and others. Snapchat has maintained to its original vision of short disappearing images, therefore the content on Discover changes daily, nonetheless you can go back and look at it multiple times in one day. Most millennials use Facebook and Snapchat as their main sources of news and information. The amount of sources we view are limited leaving very few large media outlets the ones feeding us information. This creates a very narrow view point and the same headlines to be disseminated throughout platforms resulting in it being very difficult to find unbiased news sources. Before digital times there were hundreds of newspaper outlets, where people got their news from. With the rise of the internet and the digital era, these small news sources have died out and five main media corporations control most of the news. Therefore, as millennials growing up in an era where we trust technology and are faithful towards platforms like Facebook and Snapchat we must also be aware of this issue. Facebook and Snapchat, both have algorithmic qualities that only show us content that aligns with our interests and behaviors. On Snapchat Discover the news outlets available to browse varies depending on the user, and on Facebook the top stories on your timeline will vary depending on popularity and engagement of the post but also on the way you engage with other content on Facebook. Your newsfeed on Facebook will only show you posts from the same friends you tend to participate with and you may never see what many of your other friend’s post. Facebook does this by tracking your user behavior in order to show you similar content, knowing it will conduce higher engagement levels. I think that this affordance is one of the most important and that it holds a lot of power. Likes and followers are being monetized and market cap is being valued more than profitability. Facebook and Snapchats value comes from its users and their participation on the platform. The main goal of these companies is to increase participation levels, and they are constantly creating updates and innovating their platforms to keep their users engaged and tuned in. In order for a digital artifact to have the encyclopedic affordance it must efficiently be able to store and contain a large amount of data and information. While also being able to easily access this information in an organized and classified manner. “The challenge for designers is determining how to organize information so that it is retrievable in a coherent form that minimizes confusion and maximizes understanding.” – Murray Facebook is also an encyclopedic medium. It has a huge database of users, there are currently 1.2 billion people on Facebook. Facebook collects user’s information, such as demographics, gender, habits, interests, etc. and sells the information to advertises and monetizes from it. Facebook tries to gather as much information possible from its users and does so by prompting the user profile interface with personal questions. Facebook does not explicitly tell the user that their personal information is being sold to a third party, and does a good job of making the user feel as if their Facebook experience will be improved the more information they share. Nonetheless, given Facebook’s huge collection of data and information on people, users are easily able to look up and re connect with friends by just searching an area, school, interest, or activities. For example, you can search on Facebook using the prompt “friends who like…” or “friends from…” or “friends near me” and even narrow the search by post, tagged location, and date. Facebook manages a huge amount of data and makes it very accessible for users and advertisers to reach. Snapchat also handles a large amount of data, there are currently 140 million users on Snapchat. Murray describes the encyclopedic medium as the “Act of classification, of assigning objects too standardized categories often through the use of metadata.” One of the ways that Snapchat classifies its users is with emoji’s. Each emoji symbolizes a specific kind of friendship, depending on your levels of interaction. This mode of categorizing emulates real life friendships because it ranks your friends by friendship, it displays your top 8 best friends with a smile face next to their name. You also have the ability to create groups on Snapchat, which facilitates finding specific friends. Even through its organizational methods Snapchat has found a unique way to appeal to its target audience and maintain a sleek and user friendly interface. The spatial affordance has to do with how information is presented and the organizational and presentational quality of the content. “It creates virtual spaces that are also navigable by the interactor” –Murray. It may be related to a similar medium in order to satisfy the users expectations. It also takes into account the device that is used to display the digital content and how the device influences the digital space. “We perceive web pages as occupying sites that we visit” –Murray. Facebook is a space of its own. We frequently think about Facebook as a place we are on and go to. We speak about it as if it were a physical space in the world where we meet people, see things, and explore. We can also access Facebook through various devices be it a phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, etc. Facebook modifies its interface depending on the device. For example, if you use Facebook from your phone you will not be able to have the same array of features that exist on the desktop version. “Designers face challenges in providing a consistent model of the space as a whole and in making individual areas memorable and findable” –Murray. Facebook does a very good job at making everything findable and definitely memorable. Many icons are digital adaptations of preexisting non digital mediums. For example, the events icon simulates a normal calendar, the newsfeed button looks like the front page of a newspaper, and the birthday icon is a present. Even though Facebook is a digital platform it relies on traditional notions and images to associate with in order to appeal to the user’s expectations. Unlike Snapchat, Facebook does not rely on real time. Facebooks newsfeed used to flow according to most recent post, but since Facebook incorporated advertisements content is displayed by popularity or paid ads. Snapchat also holds a very unique space. You go on Snapchat to get a different experience than that of Facebook. Snapchat feels more personal and allows you to connect on a different level with other users. Snapchat has three main spaces or sections that have different functionalities. The camera, the stories section, and the chat section. The camera space has a very sleek and simple design with 6 icons or buttons on the borders of the camera. The main button in this section is found at the bottom middle and takes the picture. The other two icons to the left and right of the larger middle icon serve as navigational buttons that take you to the chat section and stories section. Naturally the chat icon is the standard messenger image, and the stories icon is unique to Snapchat and is just three circles that form a triangle emulating the way in which stories are displayed. To navigate to the other sections, you just swipe left or right, and on the top of each section there is a blue bar that reads the title of the section and on the bottom the same three icons are always displayed in the same order expect depending on what section you are using that specific icon will be underlined. If there are new stories that you have not seen Snapchat will illuminate the stories icon with purple and similarly if there is a new chat awaiting the chat icon will illuminate with blue. The stories area is divided by sections, your story which appears at the top and then a subtitle that reads “recent updates” where your friends stories appear in chronological order. Each story has a circular cover image that displays a snippet of the full story next to the person’s name, and bellow their name you can see how long ago the story was uploaded. It does not show a specific time, rather it displays the minutes or hours that have passed since the story was uploaded. As you scroll down there is a purple indicator to the right of the screen that has a time stamp of when the story was published, given that you can only view a story within 24 hours of it being uploaded. Snapchat has grasped our fast passed and constantly changing real world environment and space and incorporated it to its chore interface. Snapchat has created a space where you can upload videos and images instantaneously that are bounded by a time constraint, taping into our need to always be connected, updated, and on the radar. All four affordances are very important to Facebook and Snapchat’s success. They all work together to create these amazing platforms that not only have revolutionized our digital lives, but have become such a central part of our day to day lives that our habits as humans are changing. Evolution is changing how our brains work due to these social media platforms. Our attention spans are much shorter, we are less patient, are more impulsive, and put less effort into relationships. Source
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Inventing the medium: principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
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AuthorI am from Panama and a sophomore at Emory University. I am passionate about photography and media making. Archives |