Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory

Abstract

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 We will argue that communication scholars have misappropriated an outdated definition of affordance from psychology that neither fits with how the term is used in that discipline nor helps communication scholars advance theory of our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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“…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.…”

Expanding Imagined Affordance with Futuretypes: Challenging Algorithmic Power with Collective 2040 Imagination

“…As Peter Nagy and Gina Neff outline in discussing "imagined affordances" [4], the gap of imagination is the elephant in the room and often neglected in our research between how a citizen embraces and deploys a technology and what its designer intended. As Stuart Candy reminds us, we require a more sophisticated culture of the imagination [5], of intentional imagined insights not just from the designers, content strategists, and programmers at Facebook or Google.…”

“…"Imagined users are a 'mirror' to real users refracted through designers' 'motivations and assumptions'" and the necessity for augmenting that mirror with more visible citizen imagery of algorithmic foresight demands our attention. As Neff and Nagy insist, " [ [4]. Imagination entails perception, not just rationality.…”

“…Affordances can and should be defined to include properties of technologies that are 'imagined' by users, by their fears, their expectations, and their uses, as well as by those of the designers. What people expect out of their data, the 'data valences' [19], are important aspects of the affordance of socio-technical systems" [4]. Futuretypes, as persistent memes of the future, embody and circulate these imagined affordances of user aspiration.…”

“…Neff and Nagy recall that "for most users algorithms structure 'hidden affordances,' those of which users are unaware" [4] where "[a]ffordances 'include the expectations and beliefs of users, whether or not they are 'true' or 'right.' Affordances can and should be defined to include properties of technologies that are 'imagined' by users, by their fears, their expectations, and their uses, as well as by those of the designers.…”