Affordances for Sense-Making: Exploring Their Availability for Users of Online News Sites

Abstract

Each medium of news delivery has a unique set of attributes that facilitate or impede consumption and learning. In this article, we examine what affordances of digital news sites are present or absent. Based on the perspectives of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his conceptualizations of affordances, as well as Norman’s theorizing of signifiers, we conducted an exploratory study with loyal digital news readers to query their reliance on a number of affordances. We compared those findings to the affordances realized in print and argued that many signals supporting sense-making of the print news are attenuated in digital. Implications are discussed.

Keywords:

• Affordances
• media affordances
• sense-making
• digital media
• ecological psychology
• news consumption

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Randy Picht and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute for its grant on this project. We also thank Dr. Isa Jahnke and her Information Experience Lab for helping with data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (202001).