The interaction of technological affordances and user preferences: A corpus-based study of graphic features across Twitter and Discord

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of communication device on linguistic variation across two levels of scale. Drawing on the notion of affordances (Hutchby, 2001), it explores how technological differences between the computer and smartphone may shape, without ultimately determining, the use of graphic features. To do so, the empirical study uses the methodological approach of ‘scaling down’ the analysis of two features across device types: first letter capitalisation and emoji. The first step of analysis is purely quantitative, focusing on linguistic variation in a corpus of a million messages from Twitter (now X). The second step of analysis uses quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the same features within several thousand messages, by two known participants, across the platforms Twitter and Discord. Thus, the study integrates initial results from a large, anonymous corpus with a much smaller but more detailed one. Overall, device affordances are found to influence feature use; however, statistical tendencies regarding variation across device type do not necessarily hold true for each dimension of context or individual. The combination of different scales thus leads to a more thorough understanding of the influence of technology on linguistic variation and its limits in favour of contextual factors and individual preferences.