Affordances, Technical Agency, and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Neff, Gina; Jordan, Tim; McVeigh-Schultz, Joshua; Gillespie, Tarleton

doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.678520

Cited by 42 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Affordances have provided a kind of middle ground between technological determinism and social construction, a move that allowed researchers to point to the materiality or functions of technology while reminding their readers that these functions are always subsumed by users' actions (Graves, 2007;Neff, Jordan, McVeigh-Schultz, & Gillespie, 2012). Suggesting a technology affords social action has been seen as "a nondeterministic way out of these two polar interpretations of technology use" (Hogan, 2009, p. 24).…”

Section: Imagined Consensus: Affordance In Communication Technology Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory

Nagy¹,

Neff

2015

Social Media + Society

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432

364

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Creative Commons CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). SI: Culture DigitallyFor this essay, we turn to one commonly used term in that literature that warrants significant reconsideration-if not reconstruction-affordance. A widely used keyword for communication technology studies, affordance nevertheless lacks a clear definition in the communication and media studies literature. We will argue that communication scholars have misappropriated an outdated definition of affordance from psychology that neither fits with how the term is used in that discipline nor helps communication scholars advance theory of our own. Emerging approaches to materiality within communication, attention to affect and emotion, and renewed interest in the processes of mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced notion of technological affordance than the communication field currently uses. When scholars use "affordances and constraints" to describe the qualities of communication technologies and media, they tap into concepts rooted in a history of scholarly conversations. However, we would argue the phrase now fails to capture the complexity of the interactive production of the stuff of communication and the richness of the emerging new scholarship that gives serious attention to the materiality, affect, and media on which communication are built.As a corrective, we propose the concept imagined affordance. We mean imagined affordance in three distinct ways. First, communication scholars have imagined a consensus or clarity around the term "affordance," which lacks in reality a clear definition within the communication literature. Second, imagined affordance evokes the imagination of both users and designers-expectations for technology that are not fully realized in conscious, rational knowledge but are nonetheless concretized or materialized in socio-technical systems. Affordances are, we argue, in large part imagined by users, a meaning of affordance that we get from psychology that has 603385S MSXXX10.1177/2056305115603385Social Media + SocietyNagy and Neff AbstractIn this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication-affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and other such "smart" innovations. Within technology studies, emerging theories of materiality, affect, and mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced d...

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Section: Imagined Consensus: Affordance In Communication Technology Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory

Nagy¹,

Neff

2015

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

432

364

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Researchers have already begun to explore how power flows on and through platforms: at the level of design, platform affordances, such as Twitter's 140-character length limit, shape which user behaviors are encouraged or discouraged on the platform (Nagy & Neff, 2015;Neff, Jordan, McVeigh-Schultz, & Gillespie, 2012). The workings of these affordances are often made most visible when they change: the elimination of the character limit for direct messages, for example, had an effect on the kinds of discourse-and therefore the broader culture-of the community of Twitter users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

West

2017

MaC

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Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers-by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users' labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook's nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms.

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“…This also occasions a shift toward the broader sociocultural context. In contrast, HCI studies of technology affordances often occur on the micro level-the immediate context [42]. Second, a relational affordances view looks beyond program functions to inspect the social capabilities that certain communication technologies enable.…”

Section: Insights From the Communication Field: A Constitutive Model mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…In contrast, a designer who embraces a constitutive model of communication would expect users to creatively modify the technology and include those opportunities in the design for the generation of new meanings. As a result, affordances become popular among communication scholars who explore the complex relationship between technologies and society (e.g., [3,25,42,63]). …”

Section: Insights From the Communication Field: A Constitutive Model mentioning

confidence: 99%

Binding the material and the discursive with a relational approach of affordances

Sun

Hart-Davidson

2014

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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As Norman's vision of affordances developed twenty-six years ago is unable to address complex challenges faced by today's designers, we outline a view of affordances as discursive relations in HCI design. This argument is framed in the discussion of a larger trend of work beyond the HCI field, the scholarship on relational affordances from the fields of communication and organization studies. Through comparison and interrogation, we maintain a relational approach of affordances that bind the material and the discursive will help us to address design issues such as discursive power, cultural values, performed identities, mediated agency, and articulated voices in this increasingly globalized world and design culturally sensitive technology for transformation and emancipation. With a few cases, this paper deciphers the hidden power relationship of interaction design and suggests ways of we should design for social affordances.

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Affordances, Technical Agency, and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Cited by 42 publications

References 14 publications

Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory

Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory

Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

Binding the material and the discursive with a relational approach of affordances

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