Blog Post #2

We learnt about four different types of power last week in CS371. Power as affordances in relation to the new social media platform BeReal was the one that caught my attention. Power as affordances can be described as power inherent in certain devices as a result of what they enable and/or restrict us from doing. It is the power of a platform that structures a communicative behaviour and our possibilities. The BeReal app was used as an example in class, showing how we frequently want to capture our daily BeReal photo at a period in our day that would be the most fascinating or visually appealing, but sometimes we are unable to since the BeReal of the day has not prompted each of the users yet. Due to the control the applications' setup has over us, it restricts and limits our possibilities at that time and prevents us from accomplishing our objectives.

Below I attached a link to an article by Vogue called "What I learned 'Being Real' for a Week." This article goes into more detail on the app's desire for users to publish unplanned, unfiltered content once every day. More importantly,  the article discusses how the author felt after actually using the app for a week. She mentions how the app will go off when she is doing something "boring," rather than when she is doing something more interesting or worthwhile to capture. On one of the days, she feels excited to capture her BeReal and waits anxiously all day to document it. But unfortunately, it prompted her at the end of the day, when everything she wanted to catch was over. She described that inconvenience as a bummer. These are examples of power as affordance.  

https://www.vogue.com/article/what-i-learned-using-bereal-for-a-week

- Crisilla