17ix25 (an example of a workspace for explication,
as I wish to construct for each of MY keywords)
*provisional and Under Construction*
Some resources collected:
Affordance WikipediaWhat is an affordance? 40 years later Osiurak et al. in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews Volume 77, June 2017, Pages 403-417
About 40 years ago, James J. Gibson coined the term "affordance" to describe the action possibilities offered to an animal by the environment with reference to the animal's action capabilities. Since then, the notion of affordance has gained huge popularity, becoming a common term in the jargon of researchers, but also students in psychology or neurosciences. There is hardly a week that passes without a colleague saying during lunchtime: "Hey, did you see that? I grasped and used the fork because of its affordance!" As many popular notions, the paradox is that the notion of affordance raises serious theoretical issues, notably when the time comes to define precisely what it is. The fact is that it has acquired a multitude of connotations, generating confusion in the published literature, particularly in the field of tool use. The risk is that it becomes progressively useless, losing its heuristic value by eventually meaning everything and its opposite. The reason for us to focus on the literature on tool use is that the notion of affordance is outrageously employed in this literature, not only by scholars studying the underlying neurocognitive bases but also by those interested by tool design.A Rich Landscape of Affordances Erik Rietveld & Julian Kiverstein in Ecologfcal Psychology (2014)
...We propose an account of affordances according to which the concept of affordances has a much broader application than has hitherto been supposed. We argue that the affordances an environment offers to an animal are dependent on the skills the animal possesses. By virtue of our many abilities, the landscape of affordances we inhabit as humans is very rich and resourceful....Up until now affordances have typically been understood as motor possibilities the environment offers to a creature such as reaching, grasping, sitting, walking and so on. Our main goal in this article is to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding what affordances are. What our view of affordances opens up is that an animal's engagement with an affordance always involves the exercise of an ability in a specific context. We argue that the affordances the environment offers are dependent on the abilities available in a particular ecological niche.
...The human ecological niche is shaped and sculpted by the rich variety of social practices humans engage in. In what follows we develop an account of affordances for humans that foregrounds their embedding in sociocultural practices. Recognizing this point reveals that the affordances the environment offers are a good deal more extensive than has standardly been recognized ...Moreover, armed with this enriched philosophical conceptualization of affordances, one is better able to perceive the resourcefulness of our environment, including our built environment.
...what Gibson referred to as "the whole spectrum of social significance" for humans (Gibson, 1979/1986, pp. 127–128). We believe this reveals new possibilities for tackling the problems that "higher" cognition has presented to the field of embodied cognitive science. We propose thinking of "higher" cognitive capacities in terms of skillful activities in sociocultural practices and the material resources exploited in those practices. Skilled "higher" cognition can be understood in terms of selective engagement—in concrete situations—with the rich landscape of affordances.
Oxford Reference from A Dictionary of Psychology
A term coined in 1977 by the US psychologist James Jerome Gibson (1904–79), to refer to a resource or support provided by the environment to an organism, furnishing or affording the organism with an opportunity to act in a particular way. Examples of affordances include a surface that affords physical support, an edible substance that affords an opportunity to eat, and the positioning of an outstretched hand that affords the prospect of shaking hands. See also direct perception.Imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory
In 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 definition for affordance than the field currently uses....We suggest that imagined affordance helps to theorize the duality of materiality and communication technology: namely, that people shape their media environments, perceive them, and have agency within them because of imagined affordances.
Canonical Affordances: The Psychology of Everyday Things Alan Costall and Ann Richards, from The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World ($191.90 at Amazon...)
Psychologists have had very little to say about things. Things are one thing, people are another. There is now, however, a growing recognition of the importance of things within human psychology. But, in cognitive theory, the meanings of things are usually radically subjectivized. 'Their meanings are really 'our' meanings that we mentally project upon them. James Gibson's concept of affordances was an attempt to avoid subject-object dualism by defining the meanings of things-what we can do with them-as properties of the object but defined relative to the agent. Critics have rightly objected that Gibson himself, nevertheless, overly objectified or reified affordances. Yet the affordances of many objects in the human world are objective, or, better, impersonal. The present chapter, however, is concerned with such 'canonical affordances' —the things that things are for.❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Evidence of my own use of affordance:
A case in point from today: Kate was showing me a road-event reporting feature of Google Maps ('object in road','diminished visibility') which then appears to other users of Google Maps on the same stretch of road. I said the app was an affordance that I hadn't encountered or imagined possible. "What's 'an affordance'?" she asked......which leads me to note the effective technology aspect of affordanceA site:oook.info search for 'affordance' reveals that I was using the term in 2005, though I can't reconstruct how/when it first entered my lexicon
In a now-cringe-making CV statement in 2005, I described myself as "a student of the ways that digital affordances change human interaction", and a few months earlier I had referred to "new tricks must be learned and new affordances purchased"....and in a blog posting from January 2024:
...Various affordances await my attentions (Valoi negative scanner, CZUR book scanner, a digital microscope), each bought with specific projects in mind, and because the technologies were irresistible...I've used the term in several /Conviv writings:
...The phenomenon of enhancement by new affordances (an upgrade to the viewing experience via a new monitor, or to ear quality via better speakers, or the effect on visual perception of new glasses) is familiar, as is the rapidity with which the heightened acuity becomes simply normal, until the next upgrade (July 2020)and...While I happily and constantly use dead-tree technology, pretty much everything I've been up to in the last 30 years has been inflected by the affordances of microprocessors. I am, in N. Katherine Hayles' words, a participant in multiple cognitive assemblages, a composite of organic, digital, and superorganic (the lattermost includes consciousness, and resides who-knows-where). (/Conviv/computers.html May 2022)and
...the recent release of Apple's Vision Pro is the latest in a succession of Virtual Reality affordances to tickle the fancy of the gadget-prone ($3500 to play...). Vision Pro is more an interface to existing digital affordances than a harbinger of a whole new mode of perception, and its rather dorky form factor will look silly within a year ... but the underlying augmentative technologies will continue to evolve with far-reaching but ...unimaginable... consequences. Hold onto your hats, people. (Imagination and Egregores and Tulpas )and in an article on The Archaeology of Ritual by Edward Swenson (2015), downloaded from Annual Review of Anthropology:...In the end, a consideration of ritual in its own right—as involving an alteration in the material framing of practice—does not imply that ritual should be understood as an autonomous process. Rather, it shows that the structuring effects, meanings, and political affordances of ritualized acts can be interpreted only in relationship to the entire field of social action (Garrow 2012, Handelman 2004).and from Action-Space and Time: Towards an Enactive Hermeneutics Shaun Gallagher et al.We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our embodied experiences of space. It is an abstraction, involving a de-temporalization of space that falsifies our experience. From the phenomenological-enactivist perspective, space is not already there, neutrally constituted in its objective extension; rather, it is enacted, put in place relative to action affordances that are both corporeal and intercorporeal. Moreover, these action affordances are permeated by an intrinsic temporality, so that the experience of space is fully temporal because it is fully embodied. Space, as the experienced phenomenon of a delimited embodied enact- ment, is also hermeneutically situated so that meaning emerges for the embodied agent just because of its dynamical relations to a set of physical and social affordances.
The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism Barry Wellman (2003)
...The Internet is not a one-dimensional technology. Rather, it merges several media into one medium. Nor is it static. A set of current and imminent changes creates possibilities — social affordances — for how the Internet can influence everyday life: