In 2014, a fifty-seven-year-old woman was arrested and charged with “interfering with a peace officer” after crossing police tape during a standoff between law enforcement and a potentially violent suspect near her home in Eugene, Oregon. As discussed in the previous chapter, police tape offers a flimsy physical barrier, but symbolically (and legally), it maintains sway. An article about the incident in Eugene’s The Register-Guard quotes officers expressing concern about the integrity of the scene and the safety hazard of barrier breaches.1 Officers also describe the woman’s behavior as irresponsible and insubordinate, noting that she was smoking cigarettes and appeared intoxicated. Said police spokeswoman Melinda McLaughlin:
People may be curious, but these are high risk situations and there is a reason why there is a perimeter. . . . They warned her a few times, but she kept coming out to smoke and asking what was going on. . . . It was taking officer resources to manage her. . . . She was intentionally failing to follow commands.
McLaughlin’s justification seems reasonable. Removal was about safety, the police barrier is a legal perimeter, and this woman was acting unruly. We might expect that such measures would be taken against any person who similarly transgressed. However, a line toward the end of The Register-Guard article stands out as curious:
A second person—a member of the media—also crossed the perimeter, McLaughlin said, but left before officers issued a warning.
Two people traversed a legal perimeter on the same night, in the same place, during the course of the same police operation. One was arrested. The other was never even warned—though the other’s presence was noticed, as indicated by McLaughlin’s statement.
The apartments in which the incident occurred are located in Eugene’s Jefferson Westside neighborhood. This neighborhood has a median income under $30,000 (47 percent below the national average) and a crime rate that is 61 percent above the national average.2 As a resident of this area, living in a modest rental unit, the arrested woman did not benefit from valued social class signifiers. Rather, her resident status near the crime scene likely undermined the legitimacy of her presence and reinforced the police boundary via heightened vigilance and mistrust. In other words, the police were disinclined give this resident the same benefit of the doubt granted to a journalist who walked through the perimeter noticed but undisturbed.
Far from objective, the surveillance, suspicion, and punishment around police tape took shape in distinct ways for two different subjects. For the media associate, the perimeter proved porous; for the resident, the tape was iron clad. Notably, images from The Register-Guard article indicate that the arrested woman racially presents as white. Given existing statistics and accounts about police interactions with racial minorities, especially those of low socioeconomic means, we might imagine that the barrier formed by the police tape would have been even stronger—and the consequences more severe—had the resident been a person of color.
The point is that the mechanisms of affordance—how objects afford—are necessarily entangled with social and structural conditions. Affordance analyses thus begin with the two-part question: How does this object afford and for whom and under what circumstances?. From this analytic base, affordances are neither singular nor static but protean relationships between artifacts, persons, and situations that remain always, potentially, in flux. For whom and under what circumstances? is represented in the framework by the “conditions of affordance.”
In this chapter, the conditions of affordance are distilled into three broad factors: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. These factors address how subjects perceive objects and the functionality, barriers, opportunities, and constraints therein; the skill with which subjects can engage objects; and the degree to which the subject-object relationship is sanctioned by normative conventions and official codifications (that is, norms, rules, and laws). As stated in the framework’s original formulation:
evaluating an artifact’s affordances entails discerning if a subject perceives the artifact’s function, and if so, does that subject have the physical and cognitive dexterity to utilize it, and if so, is the subject’s use of the artifact culturally valid and institutionally supported.3
In simpler terms, what an object demands of me may be only a request for you. I may be encouraged in some instances and refused in others. You may be allowed to enact some function, but I may not. Affordances are built into material features but only partially so. Proper affordance analysis requires attention to features in context.
The three broad conditions of affordance are not discrete categories but are entwined in mutually shaping relation. Each factor informs and is informed by the others. Perception is likely affected by the skill or dexterity one has with an object, just as perception of the object can enhance or hinder user competence. Clear perception and skillful dexterity may earn a subject cultural and institutional legitimacy, just as cultural and institutional legitimacy may foster skill development.
As typological demarcations, perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy echo existing work from affordance theory and from the practical turn in design studies. In a conceptual review of affordances, Joanna McGrenere and Wayne Ho identify two axes along which users may experience variation in the affordances of an object: “the ease with which an affordance can be undertaken and . . . the clarity of the information that describes the existing affordance.”4 From a design perspective, Batya Friedman and David G. Hendry argue that critical and reflexive design should account for variations in cognitive, technical, and physical competency.5 Perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy operationalize such variations into a usable model.
The conditions of affordance not only add context to analyses but also reveal the default subjects for whom technologies are designed. Identifying who is refused versus who is allowed or encouraged to access technological features clarifies a set of assumptions about imagined users—their social positions, physical characteristics, and material and immaterial resources. In turn, these identifications also render visible those who are marginalized, ignored, and excluded. This gives depth and breadth to analytic understandings of human-technology relations. It should also give pause to practitioners (including designers, engineers, executives, and investors) whose products are rooted in and distributed through complex social systems.
In an update to his 1988 The Psychology of Everyday Things—renamed The Design of Everyday Things—Donald A. Norman makes a distinction between real affordances and perceived affordances.6 Real affordances refer to the material features of an object, and perceived affordances refer to the way subjects interpret those features. How an object affords thus depends partially on the extent to which a subject is aware of an object’s functionality. Without subjective awareness, the features of an object remain inert.
The inclusion of a technical function is a necessary but insufficient condition for its availability. A function about which a subject is unaware is as effective as a function that is absent. This is exemplified in an observation by communication scholar Gina Neff, who points out that “For hackers and experts, systems look more crackable, more full of potential and possibility, than they look to the rest of us—appearing to us as given and relatively fixed.”7 Thus, the material elements of a technical object emerge not objectively but always through a lens.
Imagine coming home from work at the end of a long week, looking forward to a quiet glass of wine. You walk in the door, toss your coat, and uncork a bottle. Opening your cupboards, you see that there isn’t a single clean glass in the house. You do not feel like washing dishes. After a brief pause you realize that although you may not have clean glasses, you do have measuring cups. “That’ll do!” you think, and pour yourself a drink.
Glasses and measuring cups are designed for different purposes. The former is meant to hold beverages, and the latter is meant to portion food and cooking materials. One is for consumption; the other, for preparation. Yet many features of drinking glasses and measuring cups are largely interchangeable. Both can hold consumable substances and enable human subjects to transfer those substances from one vessel to another, whether into a bowl or into a mouth. For the measuring cup to become a drinking glass, however, the subject must perceive this functionality. That is, the measuring cup is a drinking glass only after it is recognized as such. Without recognizing the measuring cup as a potential drinking device, the cup refuses direct consumption. In contrast, once a subject perceives the measuring cup as having glasslike features, that subject is allowed to drink directly from it.
On social media platforms, algorithms actively curate both content and relationships. Some content and people are highlighted, and others are relegated to the bottom of the feed or entirely omitted from view.8 One of the main critiques leveled against digital social platforms is that users often do not—and cannot—understand how curatorial decisions are made.9 Perception has thus emerged as a critical issue around truth and trustworthiness. By default, the features of most social media platforms functionally discourage or even refuse critical investigation into the source of content and its place within an information stream. Hence, crises of “fake news” and misinformation have occupied public attention and prompted a flurry of responses from social media companies, which have sought to institute means of truth verification via technical design and personnel.
(Mis)information does not affect everyone equally. Novices might not know that their news is presorted or that they can readjust the flow of content. In contrast, those equipped with a higher level of media literacy are less bound by default algorithms, can perceive their news feeds as both constructed and pliable, and can alter the feeds to fit personal information preferences. For media-savvy subjects, default settings are requests rather than demands, and the information that does filter through allows for skepticism. Such tactics might defend against dubious information, encouraging critical news consumption. At the same time, adjusting the default options can just as easily exacerbate the problem of misinformation because those familiar with platform settings are allowed (or even encouraged) to filter out content that challenges their personal worldviews, reinforcing tight filter bubbles that request confirmation biases and discourage encounters with opposing perspectives. Perception thus affects the fixed (or pliable) nature of a news feed but does so toward multiple, sometimes contradictory ends.
Perception is not always liberating or enabling. In some cases, clear perception of features—in their material and social forms—can have constraining effects. In the previous chapter, one of my interviewees was reprimanded by her younger sister after sharing “too many” posts on Instagram. These two sisters did not follow the same normative conventions. Thus, my participant was initially allowed to post as many times as she wanted, while Instagram strongly discouraged the same actions from the participant’s sibling. Indeed, the experience of censure altered my participant’s perception such that the affordances of Instagram changed for her. What was once allowed was no longer.
Perception has been and remains a crucial variable in the conceptual trajectory of affordances. It is the crux of ontological debates about affordances as intrinsic properties versus relational elements—that is, is the existence of an affordance inherent, or do features afford only once they are perceived? This question—akin to those about the sounds of trees falling in forests—is a philosophical one. In contrast, the mechanisms and conditions framework is a practical project, and I am less concerned about the nature of affordances than how they operate. In practical operation, perception activates affordances and alters their shape, rendering technologies more flexible or more constricting. Perception shifts subject-object relations between various mechanisms from request to refuse, accommodating and subverting the intentions of design.
In order to utilize the features of an object, one must not only perceive those features as available but also have the ability to employ them. Dexterity refers to the capacity of a subject to enact the functions of an object. These capacities can be physical or cognitive. A subject must be able to physically manipulate the object in required ways and have the knowledge set that enables manipulation.
Variation in dexterity and its relationship to affordances is a central element of disability studies and disability activism. By and large, built infrastructures have historically been constructed with a presumed model human who walks easily, sees clearly, and hears with precision. The critical disability perspective contends that such assumptions have resulted in a disabling social structure for those whose bodies do not adhere to the presumed model ideal.10 Stairs offer a clear example. Stairs are built to transport bodies between levels of a given built structure. In the default case, stairs encourage climbing. However, as described in William H. Warren’s classic affordance study, stair climbing relies on particular bodily configurations.11 In addition to adequate leg-length-to-stair-height ratios, stair climbers must contain the muscular capacity to support full body weight, the muscle control to contort the legs at will, and the coordination to balance for brief moments as one leg leaves a bottom step and advances to the next. Persons with lower body paralysis, muscular atrophy, severe arthritis, or myriad other conditions do not have bodies that adhere to these requirements. Thus, although the stairs encourage climbing by able-bodied persons, those living with certain mobility impairments are discouraged or refused.
In this vein, visually oriented websites serve consumers who have clear ocular vision, but they discourage or even refuse access among people with vision impairments. For instance, a stylish thin font presents a clean look but may be unreadable for those with eyesight less than 20/20; screen readers translate website content into audio form but cannot read images directly and often have trouble reading text within images; and similar color contrasts (such as white on grey) can render text indistinguishable from the background. So although website designers work hard to create slick visuals, the process of doing so may request engagement from seeing users while refusing access to the visually impaired. In contrast, websites that adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards of accessibility12 equally allow and even encourage consumption by users with any level of vision.
On a personal note, dexterity plays a substantial role in my collaborative research relationships. Like all researchers, I operate with clear limits. I am highly proficient in qualitative methods and have a strong grasp of social theory. Yet my dexterity with both statistical analyses and large-scale data analytics is relatively basic. I do not have the skills to build complex statistical models or write novel code that unlocks and makes sense of data points from the web. On my own, I am allowed to use a variety of data collection and analysis tools but refused all but their most elementary functions. Luckily, I work with wonderful coauthors who do have expertise in statistics and big-data digital methods. Because of my coauthors’ dexterity in this regard, the features of quantitative and digital data analysis software allow, request, and encourage complex analyses for our research teams.
Dexterity, like perception, is not a fixed designation but a description of subject-object relations at a particular juncture. Prohibitions need not apply forever, nor is access guaranteed over time and across contexts. This is because competencies can change, and so too can circumstances. For example, I could upskill via research methods workshops and classes; a person with adult-onset vision impairment might initially find screen readers unintelligible but with time and practice could become adept; and the features of a new phone may seem inaccessible at first but quickly become familiar, allowing and encouraging use of various features toward multiple ends. In turn, one’s dexterity with a set of stairs may decline with age, and an operating system update might upend one’s previously intuitive and expert relation to a device.
Growing up in my parents’ home, I was aware of how the thermostat worked. I knew what it did and how to operate its functions. However, in my eighteen years of living at home and subsequent visits throughout adulthood, I have yet to change the temperature. My structural position within the family—coupled with the practical fact that I don’t pay the bills—creates a circumstance in which I am strongly discouraged from operating temperature control technologies in the family dwelling. I am allowed to use a space heater or a fan and encouraged to use tools like sweaters and socks to control my personal temperature, but heavy barriers remain in place that restrict control over central temperature technologies. In fact, my family has very particular conventions about who may access temperature controls and under what circumstances. My mother has control in the summer, and my father has control in the winter. My brother and I should never touch the thermostat. Thus, my mother is encouraged to deploy temperature controls in the warmer months and discouraged but still allowed to do so after October. My father is discouraged in the winter but encouraged in the summer. We “kids” face heavy discouragement, if not outright refusal, year-round.
Sociotechnical assemblages exist at the intersection of history, biography, and culture. Cultural norms and institutional codes reflect and shape social and political dynamics, and these dynamics inform the way people and technologies relate. Thus, the force exerted by technologies is inextricable from the structural position of social subjects. As a condition of affordance, cultural and institutional legitimacy addresses the way one’s location within the larger social structure and the related norms, values, rules, and laws of a social system inform human-technology relations.
Cultural and institutional legitimacy can operate through both formal and informal channels, representing a continuum between codes and conventions. In some cases, the affordances of a technology are tied to formal rules and laws (codes). In other cases, affordances are guided by normative patterns (conventions). Recalling the police tape, this technology allows and encourages breach by police officers but not citizens. Citizens are legally refused access, but police officers are authorized to pass. Between citizens, the pressure exerted by the police tape varies less by code and more by norms or conventions. In the opening to this chapter, I recount a story of a local resident who was arrested after breaching the police barrier during a standoff while a journalist entered and exited without warning or censure. The journalist was marked by signifiers of high status that buffered against suspicion and surveillance, in contrast with the local woman, who quickly became suspect. The barrier was thus a refusal for the local citizen but a mere discouragement for the journalist.
Cultural and institutional legitimacy is an intrinsically political condition tied to existing status and power dynamics. How access is distributed and for whom technologies are (implicitly and explicitly) intended reflect status markers within the broader social system, most often privileging those with valued status traits. By default, technologies will lean toward the reification of power structures. Subverting power structures thus requires attention to the ways that existing sociotechnical systems serve, ignore, or harm, socially situated subjects.
In a study of flagging and reporting on social media, Stefanie Duguay, Jean Burgess, and Nicolas Suzor examine how platform features uniquely affect queer*-identifying women.13 Their analysis of Instagram, Tinder, and Vine documents architectural elements, terms of service, and normative community practices. They show that content moderation features across these platforms serve a default user and that the default user is not queer* women. For example, Instagram has a highly visible reporting mechanism but moderates based on heteronormative conventions, Tinder has an obscure flagging feature that enables sexually exploitative and deceptive behavior,14 and Vine’s laissez-faire approach implicitly supports a “toxic technoculture” that allows antiqueer* sentiments to proliferate. Cultural norms and interface design thus construct inhospitable environments for LGBTQI women. Although the platforms encourage participation among one demographic (cis white people), they discourage participation for those who fall outside of this imagined demographic ideal.
Another interesting example comes from the literature on social media and social capital. It has emerged axiomatic that social media use enhances social capital in the form of network building, information sharing, and resource distribution. The truism of a positive relationship between social media and social capital derives primarily from studies of university students.15 Although the authors of these studies are clear about the applicable scope of their findings (university students) and although social media has also proven capital-enhancing in other populations (such as the elderly),16 the idea that social media is universally capital-enhancing has morphed into a general empirical claim. However, subsequent work shows that social media experiences are highly variable and for some can be more of a liability than an asset.
In sharp contrast to university-based findings, ethnographic exploration of social media experiences among low-income urban youth of color paint an image of vulnerability rather than opportunity.17 Here, social media are not sites of resource accumulation but surveillance, drama, and danger. These works report on youth who face threats of violence, have private images exposed, and see fights escalate, leading to self-imposed restrictions on sharing and participation. Far from the happy “highlight reels” that characterize social media experiences within the public imagination, these urban youth are discouraged from the network-building features of social media platforms, are refused the freedom to connect, and face requests for limited engagement. That is, social disadvantage is not ameliorated by connectivity but is compounded as youth move online.
In short, human-technology relations and the affordances therein are always socially situated. Cultural norms and institutional codes create both opportunities and prohibitions. Cultural and institutional factors do not determine human-technology relations, but pathways are built with wider or narrower entrances and with smoother or rockier terrains. The contours of these pathways create opportunity structures that shape sociotechnical dynamics at both micro and macro levels.
This chapter addresses the second part of the mechanisms and conditions framework, demonstrating that affordances take shape in relation to diverse subjects operating under a range of contextual variables. Discerning how objects afford (the mechanisms) entails careful analysis of for whom and under what circumstances? (the conditions). The conditions of affordance are encoded into built objects but necessarily go beyond materiality. How objects afford will vary from one person to the next, from one circumstance to another, and in new ways over time.
The larger message of including “conditions” in the mechanisms and conditions framework is that humans and technologies are co-constitutive and structurally situated. Politically aware analyses necessitate careful consideration of the material and the social. The conditions of affordance facilitate analyses in which the same object affords in multiple and divergent ways. Indeed, the conditions of affordance insist that technical features are polysemic, polyvalent, and variable. In its specific articulation, the conditions of affordance include three factors: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Although analytically distinct, each condition entwines with and informs the others.
In some cases, a person may recognize what a feature does (perception), and have the skill to use it (dexterity), but face formal or normative barriers that refuse or discourage enactment. For example, a young hacker may know how to access and change school records but is prohibited from doing so by threat of expulsion or legal action. The refusal persists despite perceptive awareness and practical capability. In other cases, cultural and institutional legitimacy can facilitate or impede familiarity with an object, thus affecting perception and dexterity. For example, men have been cast as more technologically inclined than women, creating a relationship of exploration and technical skill-building among boys and making this path less appealing or obvious to girls. If technological competence is accepted and expected, perception and dexterity more easily follow; if technological competence is deterred or not assumed, perception and dexterity are less likely to develop. Further still, perception and dexterity can be the basis for cultural and institutional legitimacy. For instance, the institutional legitimacy to operate a motor vehicle (a driver’s license) is predicated on demonstrating familiarity with vehicular operations and adeptness behind the wheel.
The conditions of affordance are both reflective and productive. They embody existing sociostructural arrangements and reverberate out to shape cultural norms, institutional practices, and the practical realities of everyday life. For instance, in regions where it is illegal for women to drive, these laws shape and reflect more than women’s relationships to motor vehicles. They also shape and reflect gendered relations of dependence, restrict women’s employment opportunities, and symbolically entrench a clear gender-status structure in which men maintain disproportionate power in the home and in society. In this way, students who lack access to personal computers in the home may be less adept at operating the features of digital technologies, including navigation of online learning platforms. Features of online learning platforms are therefore more readily available to “highly connected” learners, constructing a relationship in which digital inequality comes to affect educational outcomes that, in turn, shape life chances in ways that reproduce wealth and poverty.
The conditions of affordance take shape not only through direct interactions between individual subjects and individual objects but also through multifaceted sociotechnical relationships. The affordances of some object for some person in some circumstance can change with the introduction of a complementary technology or the inclusion of other people. Screen readers, for instance, combine with existing website architectures to make content legible to the visually impaired, shifting the affordances of the site from refuse to allow, request, and encourage. Even without an electronic screen reader, the issue of accessibility is not insurmountable. The features of a website can also become available through collaboration with another person who may read the site aloud (an organic screen reader). The inaccessible website may not encourage use by people with vision impairments, but with the proper tools or collaborations, consumption is allowed. My own research partnerships highlight the relationality of sociotechnical assemblages. The features of some data analytics software discourage me from using them due to my low levels of dexterity, but I am welcome to mobilize the features with the aid of skilled colleagues.
The conditions of affordance are not fixed to individual persons or contexts. Circumstances change, and when they do, so too do the relationships between human subjects and technological objects. In 2017, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia issued a decree that legalized driving for women in the country.18 This legal decree altered the cultural and institutional support available to Saudi women who wished to operate vehicles. Many of the car’s affordances were previously refused to women by threat of imprisonment but now would be allowed. For some women, this legal change requested and encouraged driving (though a lifetime of being a passenger might inhibit perception and dexterity, posing barriers to use). For women who continue to adhere to traditional beliefs and are embedded in traditional networks, operating a motor vehicle is, at best, allowed. Indeed, the normative cultural milieu of this latter group may still demand driving abstinence.
At a meta level, the conditions of affordance both situate analytic outcomes and also sharpen the analytic process. Technology commentators are necessarily entrenched in cultural systems. From a first-person perspective, affordance analyses will be colored by the social position of the analyst. Whether some feature reads most clearly as request versus allow, for example, may well be a function of the conditions under which a particular analyst encounters a particular object (such as cultural and institutional access to that object). The conditions of affordance thus not only contextualize how artifacts afford but also encourage analytic reflexivity. If analysts must always ask for whom and under what circumstances?, they foreground their own default assumptions about the opportunities and constraints of the technology under consideration. The conditions of affordance thus reveal potential biases and infuse the analytic process with critical self-reflection.
Having operationalized a model of affordances in which mechanisms and conditions combine to structure analyses of subject-object relations, we turn now to methodological strategies by which such an operationalization can be applied. What I set roots for in chapters 1, 2, and 3 and delineate in in chapters 4 and 5 is an agile and politically attuned analytic tool. The following chapter identifies and describes methodologies of implementation. Rather than suggest something entirely novel, chapter 6 instead demarcates methodological approaches that resonate with key assumptions of the mechanisms and conditions framework, thus generating symbiotic theory-methods pairings.