Parchoma writes that the term ‘affordance’ stems from Gibsons (1977) theory of affordances, however, over time it evolved to describe what material artifacts such as media technologies allow people to do (Parchoma, 2014).

YouTube’s technological properties are enabling users to create and upload videos, comment, share and subscribe to accounts, reaffirming the idea that digital culture is participatory (Jenkins, 2010). YouTube affords experienced participants to pass along their knowledge to novices through detailed step-by-step videos for making garments. Jenkins also writes that these creators and members of the participatory culture also believe their “contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another”, and to an extent this is true, in the sewing community there are specific creators I look for when on YouTube, they have a large fan bases and are skilled in what they do, those in the community value them.

Social media applications features are “communicational actors” that produce meanings and meaningfulness (Langlois, 2014, pp.52). For example, the ability to upvote/downvote on a Reddit sewing thread, and hit the like button on Twitter, the meaning/ afford is not decisive, however, it suggests a limited number of possibilities, allowing users to communicate in a reactive response without needing to use language.

Each social media site has their own technological affordances, meaning the sites have different possibilities. In the fashion community the hashtag #imadeyourclothes is a social movement started by garment workers. This affordance allows for widespread attention to the social injustices of the fashion industry, by creating casual political communication in our every day lives, it helps develop ‘distribution frame’ mentioned by Ince et al. (Ince et al., 2017). The hashtag makes the movement easily searchable creating a semantic network, larger audiences can interact with the movement and the awareness will spread further (Ince et al., 2017). This is a clear example of how technological affordances such as hashtags can be used as a tool for social change.