Affordances

Possible interactions that a tool, medium, or environment offers to its users, shaping the way content can be created, experienced, and understood
Hanna-Riikka Roine 2026-02-20

Explication

Affordance is a multidisciplinary term used in a wide variety of fields today. Originally coined by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson, for whom affordances are what the environment provides or furnishes an animal (or an agent). In Gibson’s approach, the affordances are relational (relative to the skills and contexts of the agents) and mutual to the environment and the agents. He describes this as affordances cutting “across the dichotomy of subjective-objective” and pointing “both ways, to the environment and the observer” (129).

In other words, the affordances of the environment and its objects are grounded within their material form but are ultimately realised only through processes of identification and purposeful implementation by an agent. Thus, an affordance is inherently “relative to” and “unique for” the agent in question, since the environment’s affordances may exist independently from a potential agent’s ability to recognize them (Scarlett and Zeilinger 10; Bucher and Helmond). Affordances are therefore also tied to socialization and learning as well as to the situated everyday actions, practices, and habits of humans (Costa 3642). Especially in the enactivist varieties of cognitive science, where affordances are a central term, the idea of relation is taken a step further, as agents and environments are perceived as mutually constituted (Polvinen).

While Gibson originally coined affordance to examine the relational ontology between agents and environments, he points out that affordances can also be designed and constructed. In design theory and psychology, the term has been influentially used by Donald Norman (1988) to refer to the perceived and actual properties that determine just how a certain thing could possibly be used. In literary theory, Caroline Levine has applied such an approach to the affordances of the major literary forms of whole, hierarchy, rhythm, and network as “designed things”. In Levine’s formalist approach, forms are seen to carry their affordances – potential uses and actions latent in their design – as they have their effect across time and space. In Terence Cave’s cognitivist approach to literary affordances, literature is seen as “both an instrument and a vehicle of thought” (12), thus offering insight into how humans think and changing the readers’ cognitive environment, bringing about new potentials for action through engagement over time.

The more recent, particularly technologically oriented, accounts of affordance have highlighted the multiscalarity and dynamic nature of affordances in addition to their relationality and mutuality. The orienting question thus has shifted from what technologies afford to how they afford, for whom, and under what circumstances (Davis). This orients attention to the fact that much of design is not only about constructing and enabling but also limiting potentials of action. In literary studies, such a view includes, for instance, the idea that the affordances available for authors and readers are of a different order (Beltrami; Suoranta). The shift towards multiscalarity also accounts for the fact that digital environments encompass a diverse assemblage of both animate and inanimate (such as algorithmic) actors (Ettlinger). As such, they are continuously in flux and actively adapt to agents’ behaviour (Roine) while most of their aspects operate beyond human perception. The concept of imagined affordances, suggested by Peter Nagy and Gina Neff, usefully illustrates how the agents’ understanding of what actions are available to them is partly based on their imagination: what users believe and expect technologies to allow shapes what actions people think are suggested (4; see also “hidden” affordances in Gaver 1991).

See Also

• Media Ecology - Complex interactions between media, technology, and human environments, including the ways media and communication technologies affect human perception, understanding, and society
• Remediation - Representation or incorporation of a creative work into a newer medium

Works Referenced

Beltrami, Marzia. Spatial Plots: Virtuality and the Embodied Mind in Baricco, Camilleri and Calvino. Legenda. 2021.

Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, edited by Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick. SAGE Publications Ltd. 2017.

Cave, Terence. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford University Press. 2016.

Costa, Elisabetta. “Affordances-in-practices: An Ethnographic Critique of Social Media Logic and Context Collapse.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 10, 2018, pp. 3641–56.

Davis, Jenny L. How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. MIT Press. 2020.

Ettlinger, Nancy. “Algorithmic Affordances for Productive Resistance.” Big Data & Society, vol. 5, no. 1. 2018.

Gaver, William. “Technology Affordances.” Proceedings of CHI’91, 1991, pp. 79–84.

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Routledge. 1979.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press. 2015.

Nagy, Peter, and Gina Neff. “Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory.” Social Media + Society July-Dec. 2015, pp. 1–9.

Norman, Donald. The Psychology of Everyday Things. Basic Books. 1988.

Polvinen, Merja. Self-reflective Fiction and 4E Cognition: An Enactive Approach to Literary Artifice. Routledge. 2023.

Roine, Hanna-Riikka. “The Message is not the Truth: Uses and Affordances of Narrative Form on Social Media Platforms.” In Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality in Contemporary Western Culture: A Rhetorical Approach, edited by Samuli Björninen, Pernille Meyer, Maria Mäkelä, and Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen. Peter Lang. 2024.

Suoranta, Esko. The Sky Above the Port Was the Color of Capitalism: Literary Affordance and Technonaturalist Speculative Fiction. University of Helsinki. 2023.

Scarlett, Ashley, and Martin Zeilinger. “Rethinking Affordance.” Media Theory, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–48.

Further Reading

boyd, danah. “Social Networking Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, Routledge, 2011, pp. 39–58.

Davis, Jenny L., and James B. Chouinard. “Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 36, no. 4, 2017, pp. 241–248.

Carah, Nicholas, and Daniel Angus. “Algorithmic Brand Culture: Participatory Labour, Machine Learning, and Branding on Social Media.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 40, no. 2, 2018, pp. 178–194.

Diver, Laurence. “Law as a User: Design, Affordance, and the Technological Mediation of Norms.” scripted, vol. 15, no. 1, 2018, pp. 4–48.

Evans, Sandra K., Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem. “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 22, no. 1, 2017, pp. 35–52.

Gallagher, Shaun. “The Therapeutic Reconstruction of Affordances.” Res Philosophica, vol. 95, no. 4, 2018, pp. 719–36.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. “(Small) Stories Online: The Intersection of Affordances and Practices.” The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Michael Handford and James Paul Gee, Routledge, 2023, pp. 441–453.

Heemsbergen, Luke. “Killing Secrets from Panama to Paradise. Understanding the ICIJ through Bifurcating Communicative and Political Affordances.” New Media & Society, vol. 21, no. 3, 2019, pp. 693–711.

Hurley, Zoe. “Imagined Affordances of Instagram and the Fantastical Authenticity of Female Gulf-Arab Social Media Influencers.” Social Media + Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–16.

McVeigh-Schlutz, Joshua, and Nancy K. Baym. “Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the Context of the Microsocial Relationship App, Couple.” Social Media + Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015.

Moloney, Jules, Branka Spehar, Anastasia Globa, and Rui Wang. “The Affordance of Virtual Reality to Enable the Sensory Representation of Multi-Dimensional Data for Immersive Analytics: From Experience to Insight.” Big Data, vol. 5, no. 53, 2018, pp. 1–19.

Schrock, Andrew Richard. “Communicative Affordances of Mobile Media: Portability, Availability, Locatability, and Multimediality.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 1229–1246.

Shaw, Adrienne. “Encoding and Decoding Afforances: Stuart Hall and Interactive Media Technologies.” Media Culture & Society, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 592–602.

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