ABSTRACT
Technological affordances shape the rhetorical ecology of networked digital media. On the one hand, site designers use affordances to communicate and enforce social norms. Affordances can function as rhetorical tools to build communities on social networking sites. Affordances are a means of governing the internet. Alternatively, affordances can be co-opted to create rhetorical spaces for outsider voices and, in doing so, to reshape the overall rhetorical ecology of a site. Technologically literate users can exploit unrealized potential in the functions of a site. Affordances can be rhetorical tools for users as much as they are tools for site designers.
