Digital affordances and the normalization of (cyber-)bullying among young people in Austria, Germany, and Spain

Recent work in digital geography has increasingly turned its attention to the ways in which digital artifacts such as social media are implicated in the production, experiences, and normalization of (cyber-)violence. Simultaneously, emerging interdisciplinary research grounded in affordance theory unveils the ways in which digital artifacts afford practices of cyberbullying. This article brings these two strands of scholarship into dialogue in an empirical research study with young people in Austria, Germany, and Spain to analyze how digital artifacts afford mundane practices of cyberbullying and responses in entangled socio-material-digital spaces. Much existing cyberbullying research black-boxes digital affordances. By embracing a relational, processual, and context-sensitive notion of affordances, this study reveals the mediating role of affordances and how affordance mechanisms take shape differently depending on subjects and circumstances. The study’s findings do suggest that, embedded within existing and unequal power structures, digital artifacts tend to privilege bullies while disempowering victims. They also reveal how cyberbullies strategically mobilize—sometimes multiple—digital artifacts across socio-material-digital spaces to enact harm. The combination of power imbalances with the deep entanglement of digital artifacts in everyday life affords mechanisms and practices that contribute to the normalization and banalization of cyberbullying.