Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory
By Péter Nagy, Gina Neff. 2015
590 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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. To solve this, we develop the concept of imagined affordance. Imagined affordances emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers. We use imagined affordance to evoke the importance of imagination in affordances—expectations for technology that are not fully realized in conscious, rational knowledge. We also use imagined affordance to distinguish our process-oriented, socio-technical definition of affordance from the “imagined” consensus of the field around a flimsier use of the term. We also use it in order to better capture the importance of mediation, materiality, and affect. 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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ac0d364d678347106af1c73be49dfb73100daba
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Citations in the corpus
- The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok (2020, background): “Our walk-throughs revealed that the affordances of both platforms, in terms of user functionality, architecture and design (Nagy & Neff, 2015) reflect the same logic.”
- Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay (2016, background): “…has having fixed capacities that are recognized by their human partners, imagined affordances allow us to describe users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; the materiality and functionality of technologies; and the intentions and perceptions of designers (Nagy & Neff, 2015, p. 1).”