This article shows how employing CA and the concept of affordances (Hutchby, 2001) can supply a lens through which to assay not only the interaction, but also its technological context. It uses a corpus of instant messaging chats, drawn from Facebook chat using screen-capture software, as a case study to show how the concept of affordances can be used alongside CA analysis to address the role of technology in the interaction. Two key interactional practices – turn adjacency and openings – are examined to display the insights that CA can provide for offering an in-depth analysis of online interaction. By using affordances as a lens via which CA analysis can be refracted, scholars using ‘digital CA’ can better generate a grasp of interactional patterns across distinct interactional platforms.