Pre-medium and in-medium: what is affordance?
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Since my last phlog entry I've read a little more on the history of
the idea of "affordance," hoping that it might help me account for the
difference in experience between working "pre-medium" and "in-medium."
In that entry I had already used the term "afforded" as a verb, past
tense - suggesting that the personal computer had "afforded" the
collapse of preparatory and productive processes into a single, fluid
stage of work - and this is more or less consistent with the way the
concept of affordance is used in the world of design (which is where I
first learned of it).

In short, "to afford" means something like "to allow," "to suggest,"
"to encourage" - all three of these things, depending on the situation
(there's no concise synonym in English). The concept originates in
psychology, and was brought to design by the psychologist and engineer
Don Norman in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things (later
renamed The Design of Everyday Things). Norman defines affordance as a
relation between object (such as a chair) and agent (usually a person,
though perhaps an animal); it results from the material properties of
the object as they enter into dialogue with the abilities and desires
of the agent. A chair of a certain height, depth, shape, strength - in
general an average chair - "affords" sitting to those agents of a
certain size, weight, etc. A chair that is "too small" for most people
has no such affordance for those people, but might afford sitting for
someone smaller (and of course a whole other body of affordances
emerge when the properties of the chair enter into dialogue with the
body and desires of, say, a cat, dog, mouse, etc.).

The ontology of affordances - the question of where affordances
actually are, whether they exist in an objective sense at all - is a
contentious issue. JJ Gibson, the psychologist from whom Norman
borrows the term, seems to think affordances describe objective,
physical dynamics between environment and animal; that a chair's
affordances are objective and independent of psychology or perception,
with the caveat that affordances are always measured relative to the
agent - so the chair's affordances for a specific agent are objective
but contingent.

Gibson acknowledges the manner in which his concept of affordance
differs from certain precursor concepts in gestalt psychology - with
Kurt Koffka's notion of "demand character" and Kurt Lewin's
"invitation character" or "valence" (in its original german the term
is "aufforderungscharakter"). These concepts, devised in the first
half of the 20th century, sought to describe how some objects seem to
call out for certain uses or actions - how a fruit seems to invite
eating, a glass of water invites drinking - in a way that feels nearly
as immediate as the perception of colour. But where Gibson insists on
the objectivity of affordance, Koffka and Lewin attribute the apparent
push and pull of affordance character to the psychological and
phenomenological, tying affordance to a necessary and pre-existing
desire in the agent.

Norman seems uninterested in reviving this debate, and I don't blame
him - this sort of epistemological mismatch is always possible when a
concept jumps from one field or school to another, and the details are
often quite dull. Whether physical or psychological, there is the fact
of affordance: that objects, enviroments, media, and interfaces (among
other things) seem to exert some influence over their use. Things are
always setting the terms of their utility.

This is what interests me when I write about working pre-medium versus
in-medium: that each separate and distinct stage in a process of
production has its own "grain," its own affordance character (Lewin
wrote of how each valence has an array of "vectors" that push and pull
the agent in one direction or another). Every resultant object,
product, or work will exhibit traces of the grain or afforance
character of each of its stages of production, layered one atop the
other, inasmuch as those stages are actually distinct; and as those
stages become less distinct (as indeed they have for most who engage
in writing), the feeling, the texture of the product becomes
different. This is in no sense a value judgment as far as I'm
concerned, but I will say that the quality of works produced wholly
in-medium can sometimes drift into amorphous homogeneity (at least as
regards the character of their parts).

To put it in more concrete terms, writing with a modern word processor
has the quality of a lava lamp - the words float, drift, separate and
converge, in all directions, often with little relation to the outside
world. Writing by hand produces something much more rigid and linear -
qualities we can attribute to the affordances of the pen or pencil,
paper, eraser, etc. (whereas the former qualities - the lava lamp
behaviour or the word processor - reflect the affordance of copy/paste
functionality, find and replace, spellchecker, and so on).

So that's affordance - the determinative power of the medium. It
occurs to me that preparatory (i.e. pre-medium) work serves to some
extent to shield us from the influence of a medium, to bring it under
heel. But now the sun is coming up and the birds are singing, and more
writing will have to come later.