Theorising technology in terms of affordance

The most visible attempts to theorize technology have drawn on the idea of affordance. This concept, first developed in the field of ecological psychology, is defined as follows:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. (Gibson, 1979, p. 115)

The account—developed to explain the problems that pilots had when landing aeroplanes— argues that the meaning of things is “picked up” (p. 142) or “directly perceived” (p. 127); the environment provides possibilities for actions that are self-evident. This proposal was a way of avoiding “mentalism” in explanations of perception. However, the examples offered to illustrate this are either primitive (eg, qualities such as “sharpness”) or else unconvincing (eg, an account of art simply as the re-presentation of visual information). This limits its usefulness in explaining the kinds of phenomena most educators are concerned with, such as learning, language, knowledge or professional practice (Oliver, 2005).

That has not stopped it being used to explain technology, however.The idea has been taken up and reinterpreted in fields such as design and human–computer interaction. It has also been used to try and develop a theoretical basis for educational technology (Conole & Dyke, 2004) and to offer accounts of how technology has led to particular changes in learning or practice (Churchill & Churchill, 2008;Wijekumar et al, 2006). However, such reinterpretations bear little resemblance to the idea as originally proposed (Oliver, 2005), since the social or analytical “affordances” discussed in this work are hard to relate to Gibson’s analysis of being able to see edges or walk up steps. Arguably, affordance-based theories of technology remain problematic at best (Derry, 2007).

Outside of educational technology, work has been undertaken to connect affordance-like ideas to accounts of technology use, eg, that of Arthur (2009). Part of his definition of technology is that technologies are “a phenomenon captured and put to use” (p. 50),where phenomena “are simply natural effects, and as such they exist independently of humans or technology” (p. 49). In this respect, they are very similar to primitive affordances, even if they are characterised in a positivistic way rather than relative to people (or animals) in an environment (cf. Gibson, 1979, p. 115).

Arthur builds on this definition by proposing that these primitives can be combined in modular ways to formmore complex technologies; and also that they themselves combine other technologies in a modular way (so that the modules are themselves combinations). This allows Arthur to pursue his primary intent: to try to account for the “evolution” of technology (understood as mapping patterns of common “descent” amongst “families” of technology; p. 15).

Arthur’s (2009) account provides an interesting complement to existing work on affordances; looking outside of educational technology for accounts such as this may allow stalled discussions of affordance to be developed further. However, Arthur’s account bears more in common with social accounts of technology than he seems willing to admit. While he recognizes that “people are required at every step of the processes that create technology” (p. 6), his claim that his work “is not a discussion of the human side of creating technology [... but] the logic that drives these purposes” (p. 6) is undermined by the subsequent explanations he offers (see, eg, his account of invention, pp. 113–119). It is this alternative tradition, which Arthur’s account cannot quite shake off, that will be considered next.

Accounts based on affordances, and even common-sense claims about technology, have been criticised for being technologically deterministic (eg, Oliver, 2011): in other words, they position technology as a “cause” of some change (such as learning) inappropriately. This positioning may be characterised as “hard” (technology is viewed as an inevitable cause of change—eg, Prensky’s 2001 proposals about game and media causing changes to brains and learning) or “soft” (a technicist account in which technology causes change, but is not the sole cause—eg, Conole & Dyke, 2004), and can be contrasted with accounts that explain technology and its effects as being socially constructed. While these three positions are best understood as points of reference on a continuum, rather than being absolutely distinct, distinguishing them is helpful as a way of delineating contrasting assumptions and positions.