How Artifacts Afford

Table of Contents
Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
A Trolley Problem of a Particular Sort 1
Affordances 6
Operationalizing Affordances: The Mechanisms and Conditions Framework 11
How Afforances Matter 14
Situating the Text 15
Outline of the Book 21
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Affordances 25
Origins in Ecological Psychology 27
Afforances Spread 29
Objects, Subjects, and Contexts 34
Sustained Critiques 39
Pathways Forward 41
Chapter 3: Politics and Power 45
The Medium Is the Message: McLuhan on Technologies as Objects of Study 47
Actor-Network Theory: Overcoming Technological Determinism 50
The Politics of Artifacts 53
Technology as Materialized Action: Technological Efficacy and Human Agency 56
Chapter Summary 60
Chapter 4: Mechanisms of Affordance 63
Requests and Demands 66
Encourage, Discourage, and Refuse 71
Allow 80
Chapter Summary 83
Chapter 5: Conditions of Affordance 87
Perception 91
Dexterity 94
Cultural and Institutional Legitimacy 96
Chapter Summary 100
Chapter 6: Affordances in Practice 105
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis 108
The Walkthrough Method and App Feature Analysis 110
Values Reflection 116
Adversarial Design 118
Chapter Summary 121
Chapter 7: Conclusion 123
Big Question 1: How Do We Identify and Equalize Digital Inequalities? 128
Big Question 2: How Do Social Media Affect Sociality and Psychological Well-being? 129
Big Question 3: How Do Information Economies Affect Political Life? 130
Big Question 4: How Will Driverless Cars Affect Urban Infrastructures? 130
Big Question 5: How Do Medical Technologies Afford Embodied Relations to Health? 131
Moving Forward 132
Notes 135
Bibliography 161
Index 181