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,INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND
ENTERTAINMENT – LES1
A DIGITAL SOCIETY?
̶ Interactive and entertainment media are deeply integrated into our everyday life
̶ They have significantly altered ‘the way we do things’
▪ Changes in our individual lives
▪ Changes in our society
THIS LECTURE: 3 QUESTIONS
1. WHAT is interactivity?
2. HOW does interactivity affect how individual users interact with and respond to
media (psychological perspective)?
3. HOW do interactive and entertainment media change ‘the way we do things’ in
society (sociological perspective)?
1. WHAT IS INTERACTIVITY?
Oxford Dictionary definition = interactivity =
As a scientist, we want to look at the definition through a more theoretical conceptual lens
= through the lens of Affordances Theory.
Recap affordance theory
What are technological affordances?
̶ Definition: “Perceptions of an object’s utility, its possibilities for enabling (&
constraining) human action” (Gibson, 1986)
Functional view → affordances enable or constrain particular behavior outcomes
Relational view → they ‘exist’ in relation to a user who must perceive them
The word ‘perceptions’ is important. It means that an affordance is always relational. An
affordance exists because a user perceives it. If you do not perceive it, you could say that the
affordance at that point does not exist yet.
,Jesus’ example:
Functional: water does not afford walkability to humans, while it does afford walkability to
small insects (water spiders, ….)
Affordances CREATE A LINK BETWEEN AN OBJECT (water, technology) AND AN OUTCOME
(walking, calling, messaging, …) FOR A USER (person, animal, …)
Relational: ‘users’ of water may differ in the extent to which they perceive water to be
walkable. Jesus may perceive the walkability of water differently from me.
For one person walkability is not an affordance that exists in relation to water. So in this case
water is the object. The person is the agent. And walkability would be the affordance. But
affordances are relational. So that means that another agent might well perceive walkability
to be an affordance of water.
Affordances are also contextual.
Contextual view → (physical, social, cultural, political, …) contexts impact users’ perceptions
of them (through socialization,rules, …)
So what did this mean? You need to learn how to use technologies. Its affordances might not
be immediately clear to you because you don't know how you need to use them. So you will
have to be socialised into using the technology, there may be certain rules, norms and
guidelines that are culturally or socially embedded in your group of friends or politically
embedded in the nation in which you live, that may also govern what you can and cannot do
with the technology.
For example: there are still nations in which media use is heavily censored. So you could say
that a medium such as Twitter has different affordances there than it has here because of
the political rules that govern how it can and cannot be used. So affordances are contextual.
imagine you live in Iceland and that there are certain leaks
that only in winter freeze (not in summer). So when you
grow up in Iceland, you will probably learn that walkability is
an affordance of water. But only in wintertime, when the
league is frozen. So affordances are also contextual. Because
contexts can impact perceptions, you need to learn them.
There may be rules ….
THE AFFORDANCES CHECKLIST.
exam question: I give you a concept and you have to explain ‘What is an affordance + run
through the checklists to verify is it an affordance or not?
THREE THRESHOLD CRITERIA TO BE AN AFFORDANCE:
CRITERIA #1: the proposed affordance is neither the object nor a feature of the object
the relationship between person and object means that “affordances neither belong to the
environment nor the individual, but rather to the relationship between individuals and their
perceptions of environments” (Parchoma, 2014, p. 361).
Structural features of technology are NOT Affordances of technology
, design elements that offer “specific types of rules and resources, or capabilities
offered by the system”
CRITERIA #2: the proposed affordance is not an outcome
Cf. unintended consequences
Outcomes ARE NOT affordances of the technology; Affordances are the ‘means’ to achieve a
goal, because they may an outcome possible; but affordances can inherently lead to
multiple outcomes – depending on the actor’s goal.
→ Function creep: the gradual widening of the use of a system or technology beyond its
original intentions
Transmigrants? Parking tickets? Detecting crime?
→ Goals and Outcomes are multiple, yet the affordances (recordability, …) remain the
same
CRITERIA #3: the proposed affordance has variability
Features are present or absent
Affordances are gradual (technologies can vary in the extent to which they ‘afford’
something)
Uitleg bij deze criteria
Bij criteria 1: on the picture you see a camera smartphone. Is this camera smartphone an
affordance? No, it is not indeed. Why not? Basically the camera is a structural feature of a
smartphone. But it is not the actionable property (=the actionable property of the camera is
to make recordings. Its’ recordability.) The smartphones’ feature brings to life this
affordance of recordability. You can use it to make recordings, photos, videos, etcetera.
Bij criteria 2: the proposed affordance cannot be an outcome. So it cannot be the object
itself. The affordance is actually what links the object to the outcome you could see. So if we
think about recordability it could be very easy to think of the cameras’ affordance as making
photos, but actually a camera can do more, it can also record audio, record video. So in this
case the most correct description of the affordance is recordability. It is important that you
do not conflate the outcome with the affordance, because oftentimes people tend to think
in terms of media are good or media or bad. So sometimes recordability can lead to good
things like you can document the protests as a journalist, but sometimes it might also lead to
bad things like you might document a child who is being cyberbullied and then distribute
that image. So the affordance in itself is kind of neutral. But of course it can be appropriated
and used in such a way that you can have negative outcomes there.
I brought another example: the news around the citymesh Integration of cameras at the
beginning of the covid pandemic. there was a lot of concern over crowd control, so people
had to be prevented from crowding together in spaces. The municipalities implanted huge
number of cameras that used algorithmics software to automatically process how many
individuals were present in a given space and that could then be used to inform the police or
the municipality about where too many people were together so that they could intervene.
But very quickly there were lots of questions and concerns. There was a rumour that these
cameras would send information to the police, who could then send cops to control parking
tickets. So immediately there were concerns over how this algorithm processes information,
and you could say that that part is the affordances. There were concerns over outcomes that
were not initially intended. Like in this case, the idea was to do crowd control for covid. But
you could see that the purpose of the technology was already being expanded and this is a
concept that we call function creep (= when you start to use a technology or a system
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