The mutual configuration of affordances and technological frames: Content creators in the Chilean influencer industry

Abstract

Examining the case of the Chilean influencer industry, this paper argues for situating affordances within a wider context in which the features of platforms acquire meanings. Our analysis focuses on two dynamics. On the one hand, we examine how the Chilean influencer industry is shaped by a ‘technological frame’ that structures the valence of affordances. We show that affordances are neither ‘naturally’ nor ‘neutrally’ imagined by actors but rather culturally located within technological frames that shape the discourses, values, and practices from which they obtain cultural meaning. On the other hand, we analyze how affordances provide a material support for the temporal and spatial expansion of these technological frames. Thus, cultural contexts and platforms’ features mutually configure each other in ways that have not always been recognized in the scholarly literature about affordances. We situate negotiations about what it means to be an influencer in Chile, the role of intermediaries (eg branding agencies), communication with followers, and the global influencer industry as part of this mutually constitutive relationship.

Introduction

This paper explores the values and specificities of social media’s affordances within the Chilean influencer industry. Rather than considering affordances as neutral or natural components of social media’s logic of ‘platformization’, we situate them within a wider context in which the features of platforms acquire meaning. We argue that this analytical strategy helps make visible the mutual configuration of affordances and ‘technological frames’, that is, the set of strategies, theories, and values that shape how members of a group think about and act in relation to certain technological artifacts (Bijker, 1995). On the one hand, we argue that technological frames structure the valence of social media affordances in Chile. On the other hand, we show that affordances provide a material support for the development of these technological frames.

Data for this project come from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 35 social media influencers based in Santiago, Chile. Chile represents a compelling context to study this mutual configuration of affordances and technological frames. First, the country has an Internet penetration of 92%, and shows high levels of social media use, mainly Facebook and Instagram (Fernandez and Nuñez, 2022; Statista, 2019). Second, there is an emerging influencer culture where half of Chileans have stated that they follow celebrities and influencers online and 15% have purchased products based on their recommendations (Cadem, 2019). Third, Chile has a sizeable influencer marketing industry, with influencers who work with local brands and global campaigns, as well as with local and global influencer marketing agencies. These three characteristics make the Chilean case comparable to other countries with active content creation economies and robust infrastructures (Ardèvol and Márquez, 2017; Cornelio et al., 2021; Karhawi, 2020; Tomasena, 2019). They also show how the Chilean case can serve as a basis for broadening our understanding of content creation and influencer industries around the world.

Our analysis unfolds in three steps. We begin by elaborating on the notions of affordance and technological frame. We then discuss the main characteristics of the technological frame of Chilean influencers. Through an analysis of stories narrated by Chilean influencers, we describe how they draw on a technological frame to make sense of what it means to be a content creator in this country. We focus on three main values of this technological frame: authenticity, autonomy, and coherence.

Finally, we flesh out the mutual configuration dynamic between affordances and technological frames. On one hand, we show how this technological frame enables and constrains how Chilean influencers relate to and imagine the affordances of social media and the role of platforms in their activities. In this way, technological frames invite content creators to imagine the ‘influencer’ self, industries, brands, and intermediaries with which they work through the lens of credibility, authenticity, and spontaneity. On the other hand, we examine how affordances are also key in the reproduction of technological frames. The conclusion considers the implications of our study for theorizing the mutual configuration of technological frames and affordances in Chile.

Affordances and technological frames

Scholars have often defined affordances as ‘possibilities for action’ that individuals perceive as they interact with artifacts in given contexts (Evans et al., 2017: 36). The term ‘affordance’ captures the mutual configuration of individuals’ sense of agency and the properties of objects. Despite the interest it has generated, the notion of affordances has been used ‘in incoherent and contradictory ways’ (Costa, 2018: 3652). Concurring with this assessment, Evans et al. (2017) identified three main conceptual inconsistencies in how this concept is used in the scholarly literature. First, most research tends to equate affordances with technological features. Yet, for these authors, affordances are neither object nor feature. Second, scholars have also tended to define affordance by identifying the outcomes of the interaction between users and technologies. However, Evans et al. (2017) and colleagues note, affordances should not be reduced to these ‘outcomes.’ Third, affordances are not fixed nor stable categories but rather variable across different uses and technological features. In short, affordances are not ‘objective’ interpretations of technological features. Users can interpret them in different ways. Nagy and Neff (2015) made a similar point in their definition of affordances as ‘imagined’ by both the designers and the users of technologies by variously incorporating their expectations (and fears) of the material qualities of technological artifacts.

Some work on content creators has begun engaging with the concept of affordances. Scolere et al. (2018) noted that the self-branding practices of content creators in different social media platforms are characterized by how people imagine what platforms are for, their audiences, and perceptions of the self. Similarly, Meisner and Ledbetter (2022: 1181) demonstrated that the affordances of social live streaming (namely commodification, connection, and aspiration) shaped the performance of participatory branding by ‘redistribut[ing] the labor of personal branding on social media as it is co-constructed by both content creators and audiences alike’.

Despite the manifold contributions of these studies, a tendency persists to treat affordances as independent from context. An underlying premise in studies that have espoused this approach is that people interpret or imagine the possibilities for action afforded by certain technologies in relatively similar ways, regardless of the context where these interactions take place. This premise goes against Gibson’s (1977) foundational definition of affordances as ‘a combination of physical properties of the environment that is uniquely suited to a given animal’ (emphasis added). For Gibson, affordances unfolded in the broader context of a specific environment. Following this line of work, Costa (2018) posited the notion of ‘affordances-in-practice’ to make visible how affordances are always enacted within specific social and cultural contexts. This notion ‘invites considering the singularities of how users [enact technological artifacts] in certain places and how any kind of cultural specificity is achieved in and through the combination of technological affordances and culturally situated practices’ (Gómez Cruz and Siles, 2021: 4548).

We build on Costa’s (2018) notion of ‘affordances-in-practice’ to show that how Chilean influencers ‘imagine’ the affordances of social media is neither technologically inevitable nor culturally neutral. To further operationalize the notion of ‘affordances-in-practice’, we situate their study within what the social construction of technology (SCOT) framework has called ‘technological frames’. For Bijker (1995: 264), technological frames are ‘problem-solving strategies, theories, and testing practices […] [that shape] the way in which members of a [...] social group interact, and the way in which they think and act’. In short, technological frames are the practices, ideas, and values built around a technology. These frames offer ‘an overarching framework of shared practices, values, and meanings built around a particular technic and set of techniques that go beyond any individual social group’ (Pinch, 2009: 49). Orlikowski and Gash (1994) also stress that technological frames are context and time dependent. Although held by individuals, they are social in that they are collectively shared within groups in specific moments. For these authors, technological frames manifest in three dimensions: nature of technology (‘people’s images of the technology and their understanding of its capabilities and functionality’ (Orlikowski and Gash, 1994: 183); technology strategy (views of why a specific technology is of value for a social group); and technology in use (understandings of how the technology should be use and what consequences it can have).

The technological frames giving meaning to the affordances in the Chilean influencer industry take the form of specific ‘stories,’ that is, ‘ways in which ordinary users express and share among each other their lived experience’ (Schellewald, 2022: 3). In his analysis of stories about algorithms, Schellewald (2022) draws on a distinction made by Walter Benjamin between information and story. Whereas the former points to value that is validated only through claims about reality, the latter refers to the domain of lived experiences shared from person to person to provide guidance and orientation in daily situations. In this paper, we think of stories as influencers’ way of expressing the underlying assumptions and values that guide their activities. As we will show, they play a crucial role in naturalizing and connecting the meaning of affordances and the values of technological frames.

Researchers have also employed the notion of ‘imaginary’ in relatively similar ways (Bucher, 2018). Despite the similarities, there are differences between these concepts that justify our use of technological frame. As scholars associated with the SCOT tradition have shown, the notion of frame points to wide cultural ideas that shape how artifacts end up acquiring certain meanings in specific contexts through processes of negotiation and stabilization (Bijker, 1995; Pinch, 2009). Instead, scholars have tended to employ ‘imaginary’ to capture the set of explanations that people have about how technologies work and the activities they engage that are consistent with those explanations (Arriagada and Bishop, 2021). It could thus be argued that technological frames include what scholars have referred to as imaginaries, among other notions, strategies, and values.

In what follows, we describe how we operationalized these theoretical reflections in a specific research design and then discuss the stories of Chilean influencers.

Method

Data for this project come from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 35 social media influencers based in Santiago, Chile, identified through snowball sampling. First, we asked in groups of advertising and fashion experts previously interviewed to identify potential informants. They offered recommendations on who they thought were relevant influencers in this country. Second, we also interviewed a group of 10 experts in the fields of advertising and fashion (designers, advertising executives, retail managers, and famous content creators) and asked them to suggest other influencers in those fields. We contacted by email 50 people who were recommended to us in these two ways. 35 people agreed to be interviewed. The sample of interviewees varied based on different characteristics. They had between 1,000 and 166,000 ‘followers’, and their interests included such fields as beauty, fashion, lifestyle, and travel. A few of them work directly with those people who recommended them to us. Although all interviewees had some professional relation to agencies (such as receiving products and participating in small campaigns, paid or unpaid), only half of them received a consistent income for their work as influencers. Except for one interviewee, all participants were active on Instagram. Our sample included more people who identified as women (n = 26) than as men (n = 9). All of them were college educated. Interviews were conducted in person in 2017 and recorded with participants’ consent. Additional details on the interviewees – each of whom was given a pseudonym to protect their privacy – are provided in the Appendix.

We built on similar studies on digital content creators practices to prepare our interview protocol (Bishop, 2019; Duffy, 2017; Hund and McGuigan, 2019). Our questions were devised to explore how interviewees imagined technological affordances. Topics of conversation included people’s backgrounds and expertise; how they created, distributed, and promoted content; what strategies of self-presentation they engaged in; and how they established a relationship with brands and branding agencies, among others.

Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). We conducted a first round of coding individually, to foster variability and openness in the categories we developed. This round of coding centered on identifying the myriad ways in which Chilean influencers imagined and related to the affordances of social media. We then carried out a second round of coding. In this round, we focused collectively on the main patterns we identified in our previous analysis. In keeping with grounded theory guidelines, in this round, we also paid specific attention to the significance of context in our findings. Our final round of coding was also conducted collectively and focused on building a hierarchy of categories that could account for relationships between the patterns we identified.

Technological frames in the Chilean influencer industry

Chilean influencers draw consistently on certain ideas and values to make sense of what it means to be a content creator. This technological frame shapes how Chilean influencers imagine and enact the affordances of social media in this cultural field. In this section, we describe three key values of this technological frame: authenticity, autonomy, and coherence. These three notions are derived from our inductive data analysis procedure. They were constantly invoked by research participants. These notions are also an expression of technological frames in Orlikowski and Gash’s (1994) sense: they mobilize notions and values about the nature of technology (in this case platforms and algorithms), strategic professional practices, and specific ways of using these technologies and conceiving of their consequences. Rather than mutually exclusive, these values are interrelated. We present them there separately for the sake of clarity and analysis. As we show, this technological frame ‘imposes’ demands to content creators in relation to the industries, brands, and intermediaries with which they work.

Authenticity

A first key in Chilean influencers’ technological frame is the idea of authenticity. All informants emphasized the ‘need’ to be spontaneous and authentic in front of their audiences. To be sure, this work must be considered a strategic form of communication (Abidin, 2016; Ardèvol and Márquez, 2017; Banet-Weiser, 2012). As other scholars have noted, the performance of authenticity is premised on a combination of amateurism and spontaneity (Duffy, 2017; Hund and McGuigan, 2019). The discourse of authenticity works as an ideal that allows Chilean influencers to distinguish themselves from other content creators, most notably ‘ego-bloggers’ – people whose content is a form of self-promotion through stylish pictures. For instance, Ignacia, a fashion influencer, describes how she searches to be authentic in relation to the type of content she publishes, and how her followers can identify and value that authenticity:

If you upload a picture and write “here with my iPhone and its latest features, buy it for half the price with my [promotional] code,” that's where [attention] diminishes. My followers probably wouldn't say anything because it would be kind of lame. So, it’s important that the things I promote are things that I really like, that I really use, so that everything comes naturally. It must be part of my daily life, something that I am really going to use.

In Ignacia’s story, the performance of authenticity is the ultimate job of an influencer. During the interview, she repeatedly clarified that her commitment to certain brands is legitimate and comes from a ‘real’ use of and appreciation of the brand. In her account, that is what authenticity is about.

Not only is authenticity the goal of Chilean influencers’ ‘job’, as Isidora put it, but it is also considered the measure that allows to judge the work of others. To operationalize this measure, interviewees looked for the presence of signs that either revealed the performance of authenticity or that betrayed this ideal, such as promotional posts. That was the case of Valeria, who criticized other influencers’ work because of the abundance of ‘inauthentic’ posts:

A long-time influencer uploaded about 10 things in her stories, 9 of which were some kind of promotion. In one day, she promoted a slipper, a shampoo, and then another thing. Where is the human? This made me want to stop following her and I probably will, because it was like advertising in between my stories.

Arriagada and colleague (2021) have shown how the idea of authenticity for content creators tends to shift between two poles: a strategic form of communication to engage audiences and an attempt to achieve commercial success by positioning themselves as experts in the promotion of content for brands and for themselves. These two goals may be considered part of Chilean influencers’ technological frame in that they guided people’s imagination and enactment of social media affordances. In the example discussed above, Isidora explained how she enacted Instagram stories as an ideal means to be authentic in her brand promotional efforts. Stories allowed them to ‘make things look real’, as she put it.

This search for authenticity is not limited to one specific platform but shapes instead how influencers relate to a wide variety of technologies, namely the different components of their social media ecologies. Andrea thus described the case of bloggers:

This is what people think is the most basic thing of being a blogger: that, in the end, you get invited to parties, you get gifts, you wear them, and you take pictures. I don't think it has to do directly with having a blog or not, because you can have an Instagram and do the same thing.

Andrea’s quote gives an idea of how technological frames shape influencers’ imagination of their activities (or technology in use practices). For Andrea, being an influencer is not only about creating certain content nor using specific technologies or platforms. Instead, it is about developing authentic communication exchanges with people with whatever technological means are available. In this account, the values of the technological frame precede practice and technology.

Autonomy

Another key aspect of influencers’ activities is the relation they establish with branding and advertising agencies. This relationship takes place in various ways. On the one hand, agencies contact influencers to work together creating and promoting sponsored content through their social media accounts. On the other hand, these content creators charge agencies and brands for services or receive products for free for their work. At stake in this relationship and their constitutive dynamics is another key idea of the technological frame of Chilean influencers: autonomy.

For many influencers, relating to agencies represented a threat to their autonomy because it forced them to reproduce certain beauty standards pushed by advertising or branding agencies to promote brands and products. Carolina, a lifestyle influencer, analyzed this tension between the imposition of beauty standards and creators’ possibilities to communicate with their audiences in their own terms:

Unfortunately, all the brands are looking for the same thing. I feel that I fit the profile that the brands were looking for: I went to a school that brands liked, I had the physical appearance, not fat but skinny. They liked me skinny. When I must invite people to an event for the brands because of the company I work for, they demand a lot of things from me, they ask you for certain parameters.

Carolina’s story reveals how key values of technological frames (such as the search for authenticity and autonomy) enable and constrain the actions of Chilean influencers by imposing ‘demands’ (in Carolina’s own terms) with which they must deal (such as reproducing beauty standards related to body weight).

The commercial relationship between influencers and agencies is fraught with tensions. For example, creators often negotiate with agencies the characteristics of posts they will create as part of a campaign, trying to maintain some creative freedom that allows them to remain loyal and consistent to their audiences. Yet, as other researchers have shown (Arriagada, 2021; Arriagada and Bishop, 2021), a tension arises when agencies try to impose the traits of the content they want to share via influencers. Javiera, a fashion influencer, explained: ‘A brand might buy you an article (or a post), but what I do is making that article fun for my followers. That brings the brand closer in the most natural possible way, not being so aggressive in the end’. To meet agencies’ exigency, influencers thus employ specific rules and heuristics, including counting how many posts or pictures they can share daily or push agencies to trust influencers’ creativity to brand content.

As Siles (2012) has shown, ‘affordances-in-practice’ are tied to specific modes of self-identification. From this perspective, how influencers imagine their identities (in relation to other content creators) offers unique insight into their imagination of affordances. Chilean influencers often distinguish between their work and those of ‘ego-bloggers’ and ‘celebrities’. For some interviewees, being an influencer involves sharing with followers personal and quotidian moments, from walking the dog to visiting their favorite café to having dinner with relatives.

Other interviewees noted that being an influencer demands the development of an original style of communication, which involves fashion looks and recommendations or reviews for specific products (e.g., make-up, clothes). For Valentina, a fashion influencer who started writing about fashion on her own blog, the idea of being a ‘good’ influencer changed when brands started obsessing with ‘celebrities’ and their numbers of followers. In Valentina’s view, this process changed social media’s affordances: more than a means to develop a sensibility toward such topics as fashion (which expresses a sense of autonomy), social media became a tool to reach followers. Valentina explained:

Something that was very damaging [to their practices] was mixing TV celebrities with influencers, and turning the typical celebrity into a brand ambassador, instead of the girl who showed an interest in fashion. From this point of view, fashion has nothing to do with TV, it’s not the same sensibility. In the end, being a blogger was a bit about raising your own style and your own proposal. Brands ended up killing that, if you prove to them that people follow you, they don’t care if you dress well. You can dress terribly as long as you have followers. I think that nowadays nobody trusts fashion bloggers or influencers at all.

For Valentina, a major shift in the technological frame (from a means for sensibility to a marketing tool) negatively affected the purpose of social media affordances, thus limiting issues of autonomy.

Influencers’ sense of autonomy is also related to and shaped by such platforms as Instagram. In different ways, Instagram is a platform that facilitates and sometimes constrains autonomy. On the one hand, Instagram works as a space where different formats can be shown, from a picture to a live video. On the other hand, according to interviewees, everyone is on Instagram, so there is an obligation to participate in this platform to connect with their potential and actual followers. How this technological frame is related to the nature of technology is also revealed by ideas about how Instagram’s algorithms–often defined by interviewees as ‘the algorithm’ – is a key to their visibility (Siles et al., 2020). Interviewees thus employ strategies to relate to the algorithm, from ‘feeding’ it with content constantly in the form of stories, videos, or pictures, to interacting with followers constantly to keep their attention and thus ‘train’ the algorithm to sustain public interactions (Siles, 2023).

Influencers’ autonomy is also constrained by platforms when they feel they must pay companies to get their content visible. As one influencer put it: ‘Influencers’ visibility on platforms is key for the success of their commercial agreements with brands and agencies’. In this view, brands and agencies will want to work with content creators only if their content is visible. Otherwise, they feel their ‘value’ decreases. Influencers are conscious about how Instagram’s algorithms structure people’s experiences on the platform, mostly through automated content visibility.

Coherence

A crucial aspect related to influencers’ activities is the relation they establish with audiences. There are certain demands associated to these interactions. Interviewees said they felt the pressure to answer all the direct messages (DMs) they received on Instagram, as a form of ‘relational labor’ (Baym, 2015), that is, to build relations with followers. Informants explained they received more than 40 messages every day and felt increasingly pressured to answer them immediately to keep their audiences loyal to their content. Influencers depicted their audiences as ‘consumers’ that needed permanent attention or ‘clients’ who were always right.

Influencers’ relational labor is intertwined with a demand from followers to be permanently coherent, another key value of this technological frame. This means influencers feel they must always be coherent in relation to the topics they post about, the style and narrative of the content they create and share, and their commitment to authenticity (that is, to never be considered a ‘sell-out’ to brands.) Performing coherence is a trial-and-error process. On the one hand, influencers try to make money promoting brands and products, and they must be careful choosing which brands or products best fit with their content and curatorship. On the other hand, if they make the wrong decisions in front of their followers, they could face potential backlash. Romina, a travel influencer, shared her story of a bad decision she made:

Sometimes you try it and then you realize that it doesn't really work. For example, I once tried including an alcohol brand that I thought was very appropriate for a female audience, a brand that had a campaign oriented toward female consumers. But my audience didn't like it and we decided never again to have alcohol in my content. That was the natural limit that my content found for itself.

The idea of coherence is a demand that is clearly imposed by ‘followers’ but that is also self-imposed by influencers themselves. Macarena is a lifestyle blogger. She shares tips with her followers on fashion, home decoration, and store bargains. Her expectation on being coherent structures the kind of products she promotes. In her words:

[On Instagram] I try to make the product relate to me. [Content] also has to relate to my community. Clearly, it's not going to happen, but if Mercedes Benz calls me and gives me a car, I'm going to have to say no, because it has nothing to do with the people who follow me.

Macarena’s hypothetical story is a clear example of how influencers expect being coherent in the way they imagine the affordances of a platform like Instagram. On the one hand, Macarena enacts Instagram to create a ‘natural’ environment for certain brands and products. On the other hand, she uses it to sustain coherent communication and ties with her followers. Thus, influencers say they must be conscious to avoid making mistakes in front of their audiences by posting content that can harm their performance of coherence.

The mutual configuration of affordances and technological frames

Thus far, we have discussed some of the main values in the technological frame that characterizes Chilean influencers’ imagination of affordances. In what follows, we build on this analysis to examine a mutual shaping dynamic: on the one hand, how this technological frame shapes influencers’ views of the affordances of social media; on the other hand, how social media provide a support for the spatial and temporal expansion of technological frames.

Imagining social media affordances (through technological frames)

In keeping with the main characteristics of the technological frame we examined previously, Chilean influencers imagine the affordances of each platform in distinctive ways. The demands involved in sustaining this technological frame then shape how Chilean influencers make sense of the affordances of social media. Content creators turn to the affordances of social media platforms precisely to meet the demands imposed by specific ideas of how to be an influencer in Chile.

The underlying premise of interviewees was that each platform’s affordances allowed them to materialize specific aspects of the technological frame. Consequently, interviewees feel the obligation to post in every platform available. Maria thus described how she variously combined platforms for different purposes:

I use Instagram, I have my personal Facebook, the fan page that I kind of share the same as Instagram, and now the one I'm using, which I realized that people are really into is Spotify. I made a list and people started to follow the list and recommend me songs, and I use songs that I listen to, and they want me to make a list where they can all put their music and so they can get to know each other's musical tastes.

As Maria’s story suggests, interviewees assign specific roles to platforms within wide social media ecologies. Consider how another interviewee explained her use of various platforms: ‘I use Twitter to complain, Facebook to talk about a new post, and I also share a lot of things like when you share on your friends' wall, I try to share things that I think the community might like’. In this account, Twitter and Facebook occupy relatively peripheral roles. For interviewees, Twitter allows more ‘informal’ communication with audiences. Instead, Facebook affords opportunities to aggregate audiences. Instagram, on the other hand, is central: it is the platform that ‘everyone is watching’, said one interviewee. Chilean influencers envisioned Instagram’s affordances as opportunities for ‘curation’ that requires to create different styles of content.

In keeping with the central role attributed to authenticity, interviewees imagine such affordances as posting Instagram stories or using filters to achieve authentic communication with followers. That is the case for Isidora, a fashion influencer. Against what she considered to be a defining trait of her personality, she decided to take selfies to promote a brand on Instagram. She naturalized this practice by defining it as a strategy that is part of her job, which also depends on the aesthetic possibilities afforded by Instagram through filters and video formats:

When I do [content for the brand] Benefit, I try to make it as less shocking as possible for my followers, so that they believe that I actually use it, because it is true that I use it. I try to upload few selfies, because I am not a big fan of selfies, but since my job is to make [content] look real, make it look like it fits with Instagram aesthetically and does not look forced, because it is not. I really am a [brand] ambassador.

Valeria provided another telling illustration of this process:

With Instagram stories, brands are even happier, because the relationship between the product and the person is more natural. Brands always wanted that, and they demanded it as if you were the publicist, that you had to know how to do it. That it looks natural, that you must know what you're doing.

Valeria’s words reveal how Chilean influencers drew on the values of technological frames as an ideal way to make sense of the affordance of Instagram stories. This story of how to be a good content creator blended the values of authenticity and autonomy with a ‘proper’ way to imagine Instagram’s affordances.

As noted above, a key in how influencers play the ‘visibility game’ (Cotter, 2019) is how they imagine the role of algorithms in shaping their exposure to audiences, catching audiences’ attention, and obtaining reactions (e.g., in the form of comments, ‘hearts’ or ‘likes’). As Valentina, a fashion influencer, describes: ‘If you are not uploading content constantly, (Instagram’s algorithm) punishes you […] before that you upload your picture and you can see it immediately, but now depends on the number of people who “likes” the picture and my kind of followers’.

Expanding technological frames (through affordances)

Not only do affordances materialize certain interpretations of technologies, but they are also crucial in the expansion of certain technological frames in the global South. Affordances provide a material support for technological frames that allow them to travel through space and time. In this way, neoliberal ideas of technology and the self often advocated in such places as Silicon Valley have found fertile ground in Chile (and abroad).

Early content creators in this industry started their careers with the expectation that these platforms were going to become important in Chile since that seemed to be the case abroad. That was the case of Romina, a fashion influencer, who started building a community online about fashion on social media. She is an ex-model, and considered to continue developing her brand online under the conviction that social media would quickly become an important component of the fashion industry in Chile:

When social media started to become all the rage, I simply started using them because, since I was already in the [fashion] world, I had to be the first person to capitalize on this new kind of phenomenon. And I think that, because I was so far ahead in the process, I succeeded.

Romina’s story almost functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy: being already in the fashion world ‘forced’ her to turn to social media, and then using these platforms further cemented her previous success and her place in the fashion world.

Chilean influencers acknowledge the potential of technologies – especially social media platforms – as tools to achieve their desire of becoming entrepreneurs by developing a career in the content creation economy. For Macarena, ‘the figure of the influencer [becomes possible] thanks to digital platforms and social media’. In this account, social media ‘contain’ a ‘texto-material' script that allows to locally perform a kind of self that is global in nature: ‘the influencer’ (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012). It is the affordances of social media that allow performing this self in relatively similar ways compared to other places. For this reason, influencers demand themselves to keep updated on all matters related to fashion trends and technology. In Javiera’s words, ‘On social media everything moves very fast and there are a lot of other girls who are influencers looking to stand out from their peers, so you must constantly reinvent yourself’. Javiera thus tied together changes in social media affordances with the ‘need’ of constantly reinventing oneself.

Saxenian (2006) examined the key role of what she calls the ‘new argonauts’ in exporting some of the most central values of Silicon Valley to other parts of the world. In Saxenian’s account, these referred to young men who, using the networks of contacts they established in such places as Silicon Valley, return to their home countries and seek to develop new market opportunities, obtain capital, and establish work teams. For Saxenian, this mechanism has been crucial in the reproduction of Silicon Valley ideals since the 1990s.

Technological frames travel in a relatively similar manner. Consider the case of one interviewee who preferred to remain anonymous. She started as a blogger sharing pictures of her fashion creations, while she was studying at Parsons School of Design in New York. During this time, she began using Instagram and started working not only as a designer but also as a content creator:

I want to bridge the cultural gap between those who don't come from the fashion world and those who are part of it. This year I’m going to New York Fashion Week for the first time, and I want to share with my followers’ content from the euphoria of a fashion week and not three top photos. If I have to upload 49 photos a day in my room and in stressful moments, I will do it. I want people to feel what they can't get through someone who is closer to them. I want to exchange this information in the most real way possible because I used to be that person, I want those people to feel they can.

For this interviewee, the affordances of social media provide a means to reproduce not only content creation styles but an experience that is constitutive of a technological frame. Her story naturalizes the centrality of social media affordances to meet the neoliberal expectation of being a self-made entrepreneur and to achieve the ideas of authenticity (‘the most real ways’), autonomy (‘I will do it’), and coherence (‘someone who is closer to them’).

Imitation is of the utmost importance in the expansion of this technological frame through affordances (Boczkowski, 2010). Chilean influencers acknowledge the importance of imitating others and the role of affordances in this process. Thus, they often look online for international content creators, follow them, and copy their style the strategies they employ in creating content. Some turned to the affordances of WhatsApp groups, which allows them to share information and tips with other creators they know and trust. In this way, they enact social media as a source of knowledge and a platform to build their own brand.

Affordances thus function as resources that allow temporally and spatially expanding the relevance of certain technological frames. As our interviewees put it, through certain uses of social media–and their sense of the power of those tools – they could afford a career they imagined as possible by looking at examples abroad. This career relied specifically on using social media affordances in certain ways. In this way, technological frames and affordances are mutually constitutive.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that affordances are neither natural nor neutral. To make this case, we examined a mutual configuration dynamic between the affordances and technological frames within the Chilean influencer industry. On the one hand, we showed how technological frames provide specific ways to interpret the meaning of affordances. This technological frame centered on the values of authenticity, autonomy, and coherence, which ‘imposed’ on influencers certain demands they then sought to meet in the way they conceived of the nature of social media platforms, and the strategies and usage practices they devoted to these platforms. A focus on technological frames thus helped us examine the values that shape the practices of influencers in Chile, beyond the uptake of specific platforms.

For this reason, we argue the notion of technological frame is useful heuristic lens to examine affordances in the creator economy. It allows expanding the interest on context and culture in the study of affordances by theorizing situated symbolic frameworks that guide people’s values, practices, strategies, and even imaginaries of how social media work.

On the other hand, we argued that affordances help to better understand how the values of certain technological frames travel in time and space. For this reason, we argued, Chile is a fertile ground for studying issues of content creation and the influencer social media industry. Our study of affordances offered key insights on the persistency and spread of certain notions associated with the practices of influencers: how to become a self-made entrepreneur and establish a career in the content creator economy. Making this possible entailed becoming an argonaut who could help certain practices travel across moments and places. For interviewees, affordances were the central piece in making this technological frame a reality in Chile.

In this sense, affordances are a valuable addition to the interest in technological frames within the social construction of technology tradition (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). It adds further specificity to discussions that have typically centered on general notions of artifacts by adding a detailed consideration of the possibilities and constraints for action associated with such specific kinds of technologies as social media platforms.

Both dimensions of this mutual configuration process are crucial in understanding the contemporary state of the content creation economy in Chile. Privileging one over the other would run the risk of overlooking important aspects of this configuration or overemphasizing certain aspects at the expense of others. This approach can also be expanded for the understanding of other types of platform work, from cloud workers to micro task workers (Abilio et al., 2021; Vallas and Schor, 2020).

Finally, our analysis pointed to the centrality of stories in this mutual configuration process. The stories of our interviewees illustrate how this mutual configuration between affordances and technological frames is naturalized as a legitimate set of values and practices. As expressions of lived experience, stories provide a key entry point into understanding how certain associations between the meaning of affordances and the values of technological frames are established.

One limitation of our study is related to the fast pace in which both contemporary technological environments – platforms and its technical features – and the creator economy change (for example, see Duffy, 2022; Siles et al., 2020). It could be argued that some values in the technological frame we studied have evolved since we conducted our interviews. However, the ideas we developed in this article work as a clear example of how the commercialization of people’s visibility online is not the straightforward result of the availability of technical features of platforms but is rather a product of how individuals situate those platforms (as well as their strategies and use practices) within the conditions of their everyday personal and professional lives, based on the mutual shaping of technological frames and situated affordances. This process, we argue, is a defining issue of content creation fields (including fashion) and thus works to capture some of their most constitutive dimensions, both past and present. We have provided an account of permanent dynamics in the Chilean influencer industry that continue to inform how this industry evolves. Future research could shed light on how the specific values of this technological frame change over time both in Chile and other parts of the world.