Tweeting Like Taylor Swift? Affordances, Status Production, and Online Platforms

This paper explores affordances of status production provided by Twitter as they are perceived and enacted under different institutional logics. We analyze tweets by IS academics (institutional logic of the IS academic profession) and celebrities (institutional logic of the popular music profession). We describe how the communicative features of Twitter are used to enhance identities and produce status in these two different fields. While we find evidence that both groups perceive and enact affordances of status production, we identify important differences in how these affordances are enacted: (1) certain affordances of status production are enacted under one institutional logic, while they are not under another, (2) the same affordance is enacted under different institutional logics with different intensity, and (3) different features afford the same opportunities of status production to different users. We explain the differences through the influence of offline cultural capital on online status production.

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