Affordances for Sense-Making: Exploring Their Availability for Users of Online News Sites

Each medium of news delivery has a unique set of attributes that facilitate or impede consumption and learning. In this article, we examine what affordances of digital news sites are present or absent. Based on the perspectives of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his conceptualizations of affordances, as well as Norman’s theorizing of signifiers, we conducted an exploratory study with loyal digital news readers to query their reliance on a number of affordances. We compared those findings to the affordances realized in print and argued that many signals supporting sense-making of the print news are attenuated in digital. Implications are discussed.