Affordance folklore: Truth, community and visibility during Sri Lanka’s Internet shutdowns

To governments worldwide, Internet shutdowns are the trip-switch solution to civic unrest, and they occur with surprising regularity. In Sri Lanka, Internet shutdowns have been tactically deployed to geo-specific regions and specific platforms on three occasions during episodes of extraordinary violence and resistance. The concept of ‘algorithmic folklore’ has been used to describe the speculative ideas and tactics that users of digital technology exhibit in order to make sense of their relationship with opaque computational systems. Using this conceptual approach, I consider the modes through which Sri Lankans experience Internet shutdowns and offer the novel term ‘affordance folklore’ to illustrate the discursive constructions and practical strategies that help people make sense of complex sociotechnical events, such as Internet shutdowns. The article examines three core practices of affordance folklore relating to truth, community, and visibility that emerge to theorise the intrinsic values of social media.