I like to recycle. Exploring Facebook’s affordances and constrains as perceived by Italian users involved in recycling activities

Recycling is considered as a way to express people’s involvement within society (Selman 1996): the decision to recycle is a proactive answer to a social dilemma (Van Vugt et al., 2000), where people refuse to act as free-riders (Ostrom 1990; Cotteril et al. 2008). Recycling is part of an environmental participation that involves agency, empowerment and disempowerment (Clarke and Agyeman 2010) and can be framed under the label of civic behavior. In contemporary societies, people growingly turn to digital and social media to gather and share information, and to express their needs for participation. Literature on social media and civic engagement is copious; nevertheless, we believe that existing literature has hitherto failed to understand the ways in which the peculiarities of each social media platform steer specific activist-related practices. In the context of a broader research project focusing on recycling practices, we employed an innovative modus-operandi applied to the interview administration which merges together a semi-structured interview with the cognitive walkthrough approach employed in usability analysis (Helander et al., 1997; Preece et al., 2002). More specifically, in the semi-structured interview we posed a set of questions related to the research topic. Furthermore, we provided the respondents with a set of tasks to be performed within their Facebook account, also asking them to think aloud (Hofer, 2004) while accomplishing the task. Despite our approach is inspired by usability tests, we are not interested in evaluating interfaces, since we focus on the relations between the affordances and constraints (Norman, 2013) of social media platforms, users’ practices and sense-giving processes. The goal is to explore whether, and how, Facebook’s affordances and constraints are perceived by citizens who discuss recycling-related issues on the platform. A special attention will be devoted to highlighting strengths and weaknesses of applying the aforementioned technique to such a topic.