침묵과 공감 사이, 카카오톡 ‘말풍선 공감’ 기능의 상상된 어포던스와 기술적 전유

초록

This study explores users’ perceptions and attitudes toward the technological affordances (Gaver, 1991) of the “bubble message reaction” feature on KakaoTalk, South Korea’s leading messenger platform, and how these shape their interactions. Within the framework of qualitative research and from a cultural studies perspective, affordance is understood not as a fixed technical attribute that dictates specific usage, but as a relational concept that enables various possibilities for practice as shaped by context (Nagy & Neff, 2015; Shaw, 2017). Based on this perspective, this study analyzes how the KakaoTalk reaction feature is perceived and utilized in everyday communication, focusing on user attitudes and patterns of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional usage. In-depth interviews with 11 long-term users revealed that the KakaoTalk reaction feature serves as more than a simple tool for emotional expression, supplementing or replacing text messages. Instead, it functions as a non-verbal communication medium that transfers the “practice of silence” (Noelle-Neumann, 1974) traditionally used in face-to-face situations as a way of implicitly expressing agreement in cyberspace. However, some participants participants did not interpret, the same reaction feature as a technology that alleviates silence but rather as a form of communication lacking authenticity, requiring users to respond mechanically to others’ messages within an interface designed by the platform around a limited range of positive emotions. In this sense, the meaning of the feature was sometimes understood at the level of “oppositional reading” (Shaw, 2017, p. 593). Also, some users notably imagined technical attributes in ways that diverged from the original design intent, negotiating meanings and creatively appropriating the features. These findings suggest that the affordances of instant messaging technology are not unilaterally determined by the platform but are co-constructed through users’ shared understandings and cultural practices. By empirically revealing the gap between the platform’s intended functional design and actual user experiences, this study identifies the specific mechanisms through which users reconfigure the meaning of platform affordances via technological imagination. In particular, the study focuses not only on the ‘empathy’ expressions exchanged within everyday platform environments such as KakaoTalk, but also on users’ perceptions and attitudes toward the technological devices through which such expressions are mediated, as well as patterns of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional use. Through this approach, the study presents an analytical framework that enables a multidimensional understanding of cultural practices in platform-mediated communication. In doing so, it demonstrates the theoretical and empirical contributions of a cultural studies approach to the field of platform research as users extend the social role of technology into everyday life.

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