The social world is power laden, and so too are technologies. Conceptual tools for the study of human-technology relations must therefore also assume and attend to political dynamics as they manifest in social and material forms. This chapter follows major lines of thought in the evolution of communication and technology studies and situates the mechanisms and conditions framework within and against them, highlighting the model’s critical orientation. The chapter establishes two key assumptions: humans and technologies are co-constitutive, and politics and power are central to this sociotechnical relation.
Conceptually, affordances address the shaping effects of technologies in a way that avoids technological determinism. Technologies may affect human life in myriad and sometimes profound ways, yet outcomes are never certain and can be disrupted, thwarted, and circumvented to sometimes surprising ends. That is, both humans and technologies are powerful, protean, and eventful.1 This perspective resists designations of either human subjects or technological objects as autonomous and effectual and instead positions human-technology dynamics as necessarily relational.2 The mechanisms and conditions framework thus assumes that technologies and people exist together in co-constitutive assemblages.
Most science and technology studies (STS) scholars today assume co-constitutive assemblages as a starting point for analysis. Human-technology relations are intrinsically relational. My arguments diverge from predominant perspectives, however, by establishing agentic asymmetry between human subjects and technological objects. I contend that although humans and technologies mutually construct each other, the weight of responsibility always falls to people. This does not mean that humans have disproportionate effect. Indeed, technologies may shape the world in ways humans could never dream and at magnitudes far beyond the capacities of mere flesh. Rather, the assumption of asymmetry is based on distributions of accountability. Technological objects can exert substantial force, but only humans can and must be held to account. I hinge the assumption of object-subject asymmetry on a distinction between efficacy and agency. Efficacy refers to the capacity to effect change. Agency refers to the capacity to inflict will. This distinction comes from Ernst Schraube’s technology as materialized action3 approach, which claims that although technology can be highly efficacious, only humans can be agentic.
I build my argument by drawing on three key lines of thought: Marshall McLuhan’s classic thesis on the medium as the message,4 Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT),5 and Schraube’s notion of technology as materialized action.6 I also pull from Langdon Winner’s delineation of artifacts and their politics as foundational evidence of how power relations permeate sociotechnical systems.7 I conclude by proposing the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances as a neat analytic tool that captures technological efficacy and holds it together with human agency, always accounting for contextual variation and looming structural hierarchies. In short, this chapter describes how technology is efficacious, political, and inextricable from the human element.
Scholars within communication studies and STS have taken important strides to demonstrate the shaping effects of technology. Analysts make a compelling case that technologies do things, and as researchers, we should take those things seriously. This is the key contribution of communication scholar Marshall McLuhan, who in 1964 famously declared that the medium is the message.8 McLuhan was pushing back against what he saw as two recurrent and related errors in academic commentary on media in society: (1) the presumption that technology is neutral and (2) an exclusive focus on media content as the unit of analysis.
McLuhan directly opposes the idea of technological neutrality. The assumption that technology is neutral means that the technology itself has no organizing function and instead, all that matters is what people do with technological objects. A position of technological neutrality, or extreme constructivism, ignores a deep empirical history in which social life has continually reformed in the face of technological change. For instance, the industrial revolution brought with it not only changing work conditions but also the rise of cities, the emergence of a “middle class,” and a restructuring of families that tied many women to uncompensated labor in the home. In this way, the introduction of the train rail organized economic and political life around periodic stops on a fixed geographic trajectory, and automobiles rearranged the social infrastructure around complex and interweaving road systems. The rail system fostered centralized towns, and automobiles enabled the development of suburbs and freed commerce from the rigid temporal and geographic constraints of rail tracks and train schedules.
As a communication scholar, McLuhan was primarily concerned with communication media like newspapers, telephones, radio, and television. Just as railroads, cars, and industrial machinery are not neutral, neither are the technologies through which we produce and consume information. For McLuhan, the job of the communication scholar is to understand the social underpinnings and implications of communication media, including whose interests they serve and how they might be resisted.
Related to the fallacious assumption of technological neutrality, McLuhan critiques an overemphasis on content within media studies. Following World War II, media and communication scholars became preoccupied with powerful broadcasters and their potential influence over individuals and publics through implicit and explicit propaganda. This concern gave rise to the “media effects” paradigm in which media products are studied as forces of cultural construction.9 McLuhan advocates for a shift away from media content and a shift toward media proper.
McLuhan argues that analysts should look beyond what people produce and consume through a given medium and instead try to understand the medium itself. It is the medium, claims McLuhan, that has significant effects on individuals, cultures, and the rhythms of public life. That is, the medium does something in its own right and should thus be the primary object of analysis. In other words, the medium is the message.
Distinguishing between medium and content, McLuhan explains that the former is a technological apparatus and the latter includes the range of outputs from that apparatus. Using electric light as an example, McLuhan refers to the light itself as the medium and the illumination from varied sources—including reading lamps, surgical lamps, and televisions—as the content. It is crucial to McLuhan that scholars focus on the medium rather than be distracted by content. He argues that content can take myriad forms and is largely irrelevant. The medium is what shapes society and should thus be the object of scrutiny.
Positioning himself against the prevailing perspectives of the time, McLuhan suggests that focusing on content ignores the power with which technology affects individual lives and collective social organization, obscuring the forest for the trees. Understanding television based on programming, food systems based on grocery store shelves, or social media based on the substance of newsfeeds would all be examples of content-focused analyses. Instead, McLuhan would have us interrogate the infrastructure of television streaming services, the technologies of mass food production, and the principles of algorithmic networked sociality. For McLuhan, understanding mediated technologies is not about analyzing what people produce and consume through them but discerning each medium’s syntax and grammar
McLuhan warns that myopic attention to outputs—or content—obfuscates the ways media infiltrate the fabric of daily life. Asking what people do with technologies displaces the bigger issue: what technologies do with people. McLuhan argues that once introduced, media quickly become entrenched. People are then swept away in the medium without an opportunity to put on the breaks or change direction. Maintaining social autonomy, then, requires a critical eye toward technological objects and the media systems in which they are embedded.
McLuhan cautions that ignoring media’s shaping effects fosters naivety and leaves people vulnerable to mechanisms of control over which they have little recourse. He thus provocatively states: “subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.”10 McLuhan’s warning seems especially pointed in the face of algorithmic systems increasingly charged with critical functions such as hiring decisions, public resource allocation, criminal justice outcomes, knowledge curation, and information distribution. Recognizing the medium as the message is McLuhan’s key to avoiding pervasive technological constriction.
McLuhan’s contributions are intellectually important as a counter to extreme constructivism and a reorientation toward technological efficacy. In response to the common adage “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” McLuhan would likely respond, “Guns generate systems of violence.” McLuhan’s insistence on the medium as the message casts light on the ways that technical infrastructures shape social life. However, his work has been critiqued for its technological determinism. Technological determinism means that technologies prefigure (or determine) a range of effects. Critics point out that people are not simply dupes upon which technologies act, but are active subjects who creatively engage in technological implementation and use. Although McLuhan made a significant contribution by reminding people that the medium matters, critics argue that he takes the case too far and erases human agency.
Actor-network theory (ANT) arose in response to the technological determinism promulgated by McLuhan and his contemporaries. Most famously articulated by Bruno Latour, ANT depicts humans and technologies as mutually shaping entities that together make up multifaceted webs of relations.11 ANT takes seriously the idea that technology is powerful but understands humans as equally so. Just as technologies shape people and societies, people and societies actively build and use technologies. For example, Google Maps does not unidirectionally determine geographies but reflects existing ways of knowing and navigating space and place at the same time that it adapts to users through the collection and deployment of geolocational metadata.
Key to ANT is the idea that humans and technologies engage in mutually constitutive networks or “assemblages,”12 with no preference or distinction between people and things. All members of the network are considered actants, and actants all combine to create an assemblage. ANT uses the term actants to overcome the divide between humans and nonhumans within relational assemblages. Actant replaces the term actor because actor generally has a human connotation. For ANT theorists, human and nonhuman actants are always part of a mutually constitutive actor network. This means the actor network that makes up a classroom setting includes students, teachers, desks, dust, computers, lecterns, and temperature control units. The presence and behavior of all actants make up the classroom experience. Changes, additions, or removals alter the classroom experience. For example, the students, teachers, and computers may become disturbed if the dust participates with too much gusto, and the desks, computers, and lecterns remain restful if the students and teachers decide not to attend class.
Applying the language and logic of ANT to a 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest, technology analyst and STS scholar David Banks describes the process of acquiring wifi for an event in Albany, New York:
After several hours, the IT working group resolves that 4G hotspots will not cooperate with their encampment. The 4G signal refuses to visit the park with the same regularity as the activists. Without the 4G signal, those in the park are unable to reach their fellow activists, computers, protest signs, and supplies located throughout the Hudson Valley region. The IT working group decides instead, to project a wireless signal from a nearby apartment into the park. They devise an assemblage of signal repeaters and routers that will provide a more reliable stream of data that will show up on time to general assemblies, and in sufficient numbers. The working group believes that the attendance of broadband Internet will allow the geographically and temporally dispersed occupiers to be enrolled within the larger actor-network of Occupy Albany. This increased attendance by activists, broadband connections, and networking hardware, according to the facilitation working group, will lend more authority to the decisions that come out of the GA and keep the occupation going through the winter.13
Note how Banks includes human and nonhuman actants as equivalent nodes within the network. The protest is attended by people, signs, and computers. One might say that the protest suffers because 4G is not fully present, just like the protest would also suffer if human activists were unreliable in their commitment to the event or the cause. Luckily for the protesters, broadband and routers actively partook.
ANT is an attractive framework for its capacity to address the meaningful co-constitution of humans and nonhumans. The introduction of actant as a piece of terminology and the practice of placing people and things on equal ground effectively communicates that technologies impose on, but do not determine, social and behavioral outcomes. ANT thus captures technologies’ shaping effects without getting trapped by technological determinism. For ANT theorists, people and things are part of an integrated and inextricable whole.
ANT represents a major advancement in communication studies and STS. It has been and remains highly influential among those who seek to understand and explain the integration of technologies across varied arenas of social life. However, a lingering critique about ANT’s struggle to deal with issues of power, politics, and inequality remains a resounding blight on the framework.14 In this regard, the main trouble with ANT is its symmetrical treatment of all “actants” within a web of relations. All people and things ostensibly play active roles, with no clear guide from ANT to discern which actants hold greater influence, to what ends, and in whose interests.
For critical social scientists, power and inequality are central to the organization of social life. Intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and geography profoundly affect how people move through the world, how they interact with each other, and what opportunities are (and are not) available to them. Through this lens, any social theory that inadequately attends to power dynamics suffers from a serious explanatory deficiency.
Feminist STS scholars argue that ANT’s incapacity to address race, class, gender, and other social hierarchies renders the perspective ineffective as a framework for understanding or explaining technology in society.15 ANT’s apolitical foundation precludes the framework from accounting for systems of marginalization and oppression around which social life takes shape. For instance, an apolitical and power-neutral analytic framework would prove wanting when analyzing data-based policing systems that preemptively label individuals and communities as suspect,16 when examining the development of cinematic technology that optimally captures (and assumes) white skin,17 or when looking at the data flows in which personal and detailed information spreads from social media platforms to advertisers and political operatives with ethically ambiguous agendas.18
Critical scholars contend that power and inequality are endemic to the social system. Thus, any meaningful intellectual approach must address power dynamics. However, contemporary proponents of ANT have marked political analyses as beyond the framework’s scope. In a 2014 article clarifying the purpose and tenets of ANT, Edwin Sayes explains that “morality and politics” are outside ANT’s parameters. ANT was never meant to account for power, Sayes concedes, and thus the theory should not be critiqued on those grounds.19 However, critics would say that power and politics are part and parcel of existing social systems. They would say that frameworks with parameters that exclude politics and power are inherently flawed. I concur with this critical take.
The significance of integrating power into frameworks and theories of human-technology interaction is quickly apparent through the now classic work of STS scholar Langdon Winner, who asked the question “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”20 Winner analyzed the urban planning of New York City with a particular focus on bridges along the Long Island Parkway. Designed by Robert Moses, the bridges were too low for buses to pass underneath. These low-hanging bridges made the attractive shores of Long Island inaccessible to those who relied on public transit and kept the roads open to people who traveled by car. Public transit disproportionately serves people of low socioeconomic status, which intersects with race such that riders are more likely to be people of color. This seemingly apolitical architectural decision (bridge height) thus perpetuated race-class dynamics in a way that maintained a white affluent demographic on the Long Island beaches, a pattern that remains in place to this day.
Moses’s low-hanging bridges are an example of what Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić refer to as the “unpleasant design of ‘hostile architectures.’”21 Unpleasant design regulates social behavior through architectural features that enact control in the absence of authority figures. For example, armrests on public benches deter people from lying down, thus making the space uninviting for homeless populations. In Seattle, the transport authorities have erected bike racks under bridges to displace tent encampments and their occupants. In the United Kingdom, a housing estate mounted unflattering pink lights that show skin blemishes, discouraging teenagers from loitering. Such “hostile architectures” can also take shape through digital design and algorithmic code. For example, automated human resource management programs disqualify applicants without predetermined credentials (or the proper key words), thus disadvantaging candidates with less social capital,22 and banking interfaces select indicators of who will (and will not) be likely to pay back a loan, thus reinforcing wealth distribution via purchasing potential.23 In short, technologies are encoded with power relations that produce patterned effects.
The main premise of Ernst Schraube’s notion of technology as materialized action is that technological objects are imbued with the politics and values of the culture within which they arise. Technologies do not merely mediate between subjects and the world but are material manifestations of subjectivity. Objects maintain a sometimes profound shaping effect, but ultimate responsibility rests with human subjects. For Schraube, “concrete historical experiences, needs, ideas [and] interests . . . flow into the construction of products.” In a sense, Schraube’s approach adjusts ANT and infuses it with a much-needed critical element.24
A central component of the materialized action approach is an asymmetrical relationship between people and things: people maintain a distinct responsibility for the production and use of technological objects. Schraube is clear in his assertion that subjects and objects mutually shape one another. Channeling McLuhan and Latour, Schraube states: “It is not only the subjects that do something with the things; the things also do something with the subjects.”25 However, what distinguishes subjects from things is agency, which Schraube ties to humans exclusively. He explains: “it would be misleading to speak of an object really ‘acting.’ Action is an intentional human activity accessible to consciousness and concerned with issues of freedom, reasons, and responsibility.”26 Hence, there is a “need for an asymmetrical-reciprocal language” that designates the human as the “responsible acting subject with the potential to engage on a socio-political level.”27 It is from this line of thought that the mechanisms and conditions framework derives its assumption of human-technology asymmetry.
A materialized action approach recognizes technological efficacy (technologies do things) but rejects the idea of technological agency. Agency is reserved for human subjects. This distinction between agency and efficacy and the related asymmetry in human-technology relations open the door to critical analyses. Placing agency exclusively with human actors positions producers and consumers as responsible parties. The effects of technology, both good and bad, can be traced back to cultural norms, corporate directives, state interests, and other claims makers and stakeholders. Designers engrain their own agency into technologies, and users agentically employ those technologies. The force of technological objects can be immense, but that force is inextricable from the values, desires, and interests of human actors.
This subject-object asymmetry undergirds the logic behind scholars’ treatment of AI as neither artificial28 nor intelligent,29 but the material manifestation of human values and biases. Speaking in a similar vein about credit-sorting algorithms, legal scholar Frank Pasquale exemplifies the human origins of seemingly autonomous technological systems:
Regulators want to avoid the irrational or subconscious biases of human decision-makers, but of course human decision-makers devised the algorithms, inflected the data, and influenced its analysis. No “code layer” can create a “plug and play” level playing field. Policy, human judgment, and law will always be needed. Algorithms will never offer an escape from society.30
The practical turn in design studies—discussed throughout the first two chapters of this book—is premised on the idea that human values manifest in technological objects. Human primacy is thus not only a tool of accountability but also an opportunity to make, distribute, use, and refine technologies with intentionally defined value systems. Hence, Peter-Paul Verbeek refers to design as an intrinsically moral endeavor, harking back to Donald A. Norman’s original mandate for designers to act as psychologists, guiding users down particular paths and away from others.31
To be clear, a theory of technology as materialized action does not presume hand-wringing capitalists who quietly impose their will onto technological objects that then infiltrate the social system through meticulous plots. On the contrary, the effects of any technology remain uncertain, taking shape only through interactions with complex societal structures and diverse users who can deploy the technology toward various ends in sometimes highly creative (and unexpected) ways. Thus, Schraube talks about technology as ontologically ambivalent. He states that “things are more than just societal meanings, more than just socially conceived and produced items. They always materialize, in addition, an unknown action, something coincidental, unplanned, and their decisive power and efficacy can frequently be located just in what had not originally been imagined or intended.”32
The effects of technological objects may surprise those who make and distribute them. Surprises can derive from creative practices on the part of users, as well as from latent effects that designers and distributors did not foresee or intend. In this vein, the effects of technologies are nearly always multiple, or “multistable.”33 An artifact does not just do something, it does numerous things, many of which were never imagined.
For example, social movements scholar Zeynep Tufekci draws a careful sociological analysis of the role played by digital and mobile technologies in protest movements.34 She demonstrates that the same technological advancements that enable mass connection and facilitate rapid organization also leave protest groups relatively fragile. Traditional social movements required immense groundwork to establish a presence and organize action. A happy side effect of traditional organizing efforts is that the mundane and tedious processes produce crucial benefits such as group cohesion and clearly defined leaders within the movement. In contrast, digital social technologies help movements grow quickly but struggle to cultivate an infrastructure that can sustain challenges from the state and internal disagreements, rendering movements less solid. The effects of digital tools on protests, then, are multiple and sometimes contradictory. Similarly, the fact that social media are integral to protests and political participation significantly extends the original purpose of some of the most prominent social media platforms. For instance, Facebook started as a social hub meant to connect friends and communities at an elite educational institution. It has now become a key site through which users post abuses by state authorities and document social injustices. It is unlikely that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg imagined his platform would host livestreamed videos of US police officers shooting unarmed citizens when he created TheFacebook.com in 2004 or that his team envisaged those shootings when it introduced Facebook Live in 2015.
Technology as materialized action is not so much a negation of ANT as it is an evolution in STS thought. The materialized action approach takes from ANT the clear recognition that technologies and human subjects interact in a mutually shaping relationship. For Schraube, however, the human-technology relationship is asymmetrical. The assumption of asymmetry that underlies the materialized action approach creates space for analyses of politics, power, and human agency. The mechanisms and conditions framework aligns with the materialized action approach, equipping the framework with a critical analytic lens.
This chapter establishes two key assumptions that undergird the mechanisms and conditions framework: humans and technologies are co-constitutive, and human-technology relations are power-laden and political. Technologies are imbued with human subjectivity and deployed by creative subjects. The effects of technology can be planned but are never entirely knowable. People may use technologies in innovative and creative ways, and the larger implications of technological developments, however they are used, can be surprising and unexpected. For these reasons, affordance is the appropriate terminology for talking about technological objects and their place in sociotechnical systems. The features of the object can be identified, but the uses and outcomes are variable. Objects thus afford but do not determine.
Building on canonical works from communication studies and STS, a materialized action approach fits symbiotically with the mechanisms and conditions analytic framework. This framework of affordances navigates the interplay of technological efficacy along with human agency. In turn, by adopting the human-technology asymmetry engendered in a materialized action approach, affordance analyses hone in on power, politics, and inequality.
The following two chapters offer theoretical precision to affordance theory by operationalizing affordances through the mechanisms and conditions framework. The mechanisms and conditions framework addresses key critiques leveraged against the concept and, in doing so, shifts affordance from a tool that describes what a technology is to one that describes how a technology operates. This entails the introduction of a clear conceptual model that remains flexible across time, users, and situations, always accounting for structural dynamics.