ABSTRACT
Treem and Leonardi‘s “Social Media Use in Organizations” is an inno- vative effort to identify characteristics of communication technologies and how those characteristics shape the uses to which they are put in context. Whereas the intersection of the specific technologies (relatively new, so-called social media) and the context (organizations) is unique, the work joins a long line of efforts to offer such a general framework (e.g., Eveland, 2003). The focus on affordances offers a middle-ground path through the growing forest on the use of social media. On the one hand, affordances help us focus on technology characteristics that invite users to employ the technologies in certain ways. Following this approach, Treem and Leonardi broadly review ways which, according to the authors of primary studies, various fea- tures of new technological systems led users to appropriate them in a variety of organizational settings. On the other hand, the authors avoid discussing these uses, and the possible outcomes of these uses, as “effects” of technologies or of technological features. This approach allows them to dodge a degree of determinism (which seems to have become a devil term) in characterizing how communication technologies work. In this light, their essay tends to weigh in on the side of how users experience and adapt social media rather than linking features to outcomes or effects.
