Actant affordances: a brief history of affordance theory and a Latourian extension for education technology research

Blewett, Craig; Hugo, Wayne

doi:10.14426/cristal.v4i1.50

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In the first dimension, we include the contributions that focus on the methodological approaches of political theory to digitalisation in the field of politics. We 6 Beyond political science, the concept of affordance, which is attributed to Gibson (2014), is now very widely used (for an overview, see for instance Evans et al 2017or Hopkins 2016for communication studies Katzenbach 2018, p. 225 ff;Nagy and Neff 2015;in social theory, Ettlinger 2018; for design studies Norman 1999 and the science and technology studies Blewett andHugo 2016 or Leonardi 2011; in social science, already early on Hutchby 2001; cf. also the phenomenological conception of technical scopes in Waldenfels 1991).…”

Section: The Contributions To the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Political Theory of the Digital Constellation

2022

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The introductory contribution to this special issue on “Political Theory of the Digital Constellation” addresses the conditions and possibilities of political theory’s engagement with digital developments. The motivation for this inquiry is the growing interest in questions of political theory arising from the digital transformation, as well as the acknowledgement that digitalisation not only changes politics, but conversely that politics also shapes digitalisation. The article identifies three pitfalls of previous engagement: The narrowing of the subject of “digitalisation” to the topic of the “internet” and, thereby, to the aspect of communication, the disregard for the technicality of the digital, and the insufficient recognition that (digital) technology is political. To avoid these pitfalls, the research perspective of the digital constellation is presented. The digital constellation serves as an epistemological guide that helps to structure theoretical reflection on the interrelationship between digitalisation and political questions. Ultimately, the outlines of the political theory in the digital constellation become clear in the fourteen contributions of the special volume, which are presented in conclusion.

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Section: The Contributions To the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Political Theory of the Digital Constellation

2022

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“…xAPI will therefore only be able to represent the defined activities, whereas all other forms of interaction with a platform -including other learning activities, which will inevitably take place (cf. Blewett & Hugo, 2016) -will be non-existing in the produced data and will not be reconstructable during data analysis. As a consequence, all those interactions that are not foreseen or predefined are rendered invisible.…”

Section: Translations Required In the Implementation Of Xapimentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Closer Look at the Pipes and Joints of Educational Data Infrastructures

Richter

Raffel

Allert

2021

seminar

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More recently, scholars in the field Critical Data Studies have turned attention to the infrastructures by means of which educational data is produced, processed, circulated, and consumed. While respective studies have rightly emphasized the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that are shaping these infrastructures, the technical dimension of these developments has remained largely unexplored. As a consequence, analyses are easily deemed irrelevant by technologists and designers engaged in educational datamining and learning analytics. This paper therefore aims to broaden the analytic scope of Critical Data Studies in education and to engage more closely with the technical dimension of the emerging educational data infrastructures. Towards this end, the paper outlines a technogenetic account of (digital) infrastructures and standards, and provides a case-study to illustrate how this account can be leveraged to unravel assumptions and perspectives implied in an educational technology standard such as the Experience API. The results of the case study indicate that while the Experience API is highly abstract and generic nature, it lends itself to a rather restricted idea of learning and education.

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“…Recent years have seen attention given to the ways in which nonhuman artifacts “script” (Akrich, 1992) actors, “prescribe” conduct, and exert influence over the environment in which they are located. Although affordance theory is strongly contested (Blewett & Hugo, 2016; Davis & Chouinard, 2016; Knappett, 2004), it nevertheless provides a useful concept to bring to an analysis of social media practices as it offers a way to think through the material capacities of the platforms. Originally conceptualized by James Gibson (1986) drawing on Lewin’s aufforderung-scharakter (invitation character) as a way of understanding how material objects project certain potentialities or suggest a set of actions by those coming into contact with them, the phenomenological idea that objects afford specific behaviors has since been adopted and developed by numerous disciplines, from psychology to design, anthropology to philosophy.…”

Section: Affording Trust: Social Media Habitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habitual Disclosure: Routine, Affordance, and the Ethics of Young Peoples Social Media Data Surveillance

Southerton

Taylor

2020

Social Media + Society

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Drawing on findings from qualitative interviews and photo elicitation, this article explores young people’s experiences of breaches of trust with social media platforms and how comfort is re-established despite continual violations. It provides rich qualitative accounts of users habitual relations with social media platforms. In particular, we seek to trace the process by which online affordances create conditions in which “sharing” is regarded as not only routine and benign but pleasurable. Rather it is the withholding of data that is abnormalized. This process has significant implications for the ethics of data collection by problematizing a focus on “consent” to data collection by social media platforms. Active engagement with social media, we argue, is premised on a tentative, temporary, shaky trust that is repeatedly ruptured and repaired. We seek to understand the process by which violations of privacy and trust in social media platforms are remediated by their users and rendered ordinary again through everyday habits. We argue that the processes by which users become comfortable with social media platforms, through these routines, call for an urgent reimagining of data privacy beyond the limited terms of consent.

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Actant affordances: a brief history of affordance theory and a Latourian extension for education technology research

Cited by 11 publications

References 44 publications

Political Theory of the Digital Constellation

Political Theory of the Digital Constellation

Towards a Closer Look at the Pipes and Joints of Educational Data Infrastructures

Habitual Disclosure: Routine, Affordance, and the Ethics of Young Peoples Social Media Data Surveillance

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