Community Contribution #4
Technology has the ability to show the user anything of it’s choosing, it can be suggested videos, photos, or news, it can be recommended people and accounts, it can be so many things and it is usually something you’ve never seen. It is rare that I see the EXACT same video more than twice, although, yeah it might be something similar since it is a topic of interest. Everytime we use technology, Affordance comes into play. In the article, “Affordances”, it is defined as “characteristics or properties of an object that suggest how it can be used. It shows a user that an object can be interacted with.”
With every post we see, the platform affords us to like, share, comment, and have so many other ways for us to interact with it. Depending on the interaction, technology will show us similar topics to keep us interested for the longest amount of time possible. That endless cycle is what keeps us coming back. For example, if I searched for accounts on where to get my hair braided, my feed is immediately full of hair videos and posts.
If someone watches a horror movie and completely hates it, they most likely will avoid going to watch another one. Technology uses this strategy and hides topics that one usually avoids. Technology shapes what we see which correlates to who we learn from online, meaning, due to its algorithm it creates our PLN based on what we interact with the most.
In my opinion, the best strategy to help shape your PLN would be to create multiple accounts. This allows you to interact with different posts and people based on the account. I have done this before with basketball where I would only post about my basketball career and only interact with basketball workouts I saw online. This allowed me to learn so many different routines, techniques, and habits to work on, specific to what I found useful.
resource
IxDF – Interaction Design Foundation. (2016, September 13). What are Affordances?. IxDF – Interaction Design Foundation. https://ixdf.org/literature/topics/affordances