1 Ravi Vatrapu Interacting with Technologies Appropriation of Affordances Course Portal: Facebook: Etherpad: Thursday, 10-Mar-2011 EB22: Online Marketing: Lecture 18 Auditorium 4, ITU, Copenhagen, Denmark

A FFORDANCES Affordances are Action-Taking Possibilities and Meaning- Making Opportunities in an actor-environment system relative to actor competencies and system capabilities 2

A FFORDANCES 3 Action-Taking Possibilities & Meaning-Making Opportunities Alva Noë: Action in Perception Enactive view argues for the tight coupling between ecological information and sensorimotor knowledge  Two -Systems Hypothesis (Bridgeman, 2000)  Functionally Separate Visual Systems  Visual (Meaning-Making)  Visual Guidance of Behavior (Action-Taking)

A FFORDANCES  Cognitive Psychology  Subjectivity of Meaning: Interpretation  Internal Representations & External Representations  Minded Meaning: Symbolic/ Semantic  Mind : Brain :: Software : Hardware (Block, 1995)  “Copying in the world” (Dr.Arindam Chakrabarti, personal conversation)  Ecological Psychology  Relationality of Meaning: “Direct Perception” of “Circumambient Arrays” (Gibson, 1979)  Affordanes: Action-Taking Possibilities and Meaning-Making Opportunities  Embodied Meaning: Informational/Phenomenal  Mind : Brain :: Action : Perception  “Coping with the world” (Dr.Arindam Chakrabarti, personal conversation) Problem Logical Gap between Interpretive and Informational Theories of Meaning Solution Bridge the gap by making Meaning Ecologically Cognitive 4

A FFORDANCES  Ontological Foundations of the Notion of Affordance (Turvey, 1992)  Materialist  Dynamicist  Property Realist “An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective–objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (J. J. Gibson, 1979, p. 129). 5

A PPROPRIATION OF AFFORDANCES (A O A) 6  After Rogoff and Lave (1984): “cognition is something one uses, not something one has”  Cognition as appropriation of affordances (adapted from Reed, 1991)

D EFINITION OF S OCIO -T ECHNICAL AFFORDANCE Let W = (T, S, O) be a socio-technical system (e.g., person-collaborating-with- another-person system) constituted by Technology T (e.g., collaboration software), Self-actor S, (e.g., artifact creator), and Other-actor O (e.g., artifact editor). Let p be a property of T; q be a property of S and r be a property of O. Let β be a relation between p, q and r, p/q/r. β defines a higher order property (i.e., a property of the socio-technical system). Then β is said to be a socio-technical affordance with respect to W if and only if:: i.W = (T,S, O) possesses β ii.Neither T,S, O, (T, S), (T,O), (S,O) possesses β 7

S O WHAT ? I MPLICATIONS FOR O NLINE M ARKETING  Participants might choose to appropriate affordances that are context-specific, situation-relative and culture-sensitive  Design ads for not only action-taking possibilities (transactional) but also for meaning-making opportunities (brand awareness, brand association)  Note that appropriation is relative to actor competencies and system capabilities  Design Tradeoffs  Provide ATP and MMO (example of social sharing options on webpages) 8

R EFERENCES Block, N. (1995). The Mind as the Software of the Brain. An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 3, 377–425. Bridgeman, B., Gemmer, A., Forsman, T., & Huemer, V. (2000). Processing spatial information in the sensorimotor branch of the visual system. Vision Research, 40(25), Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Noë, A. (2004). Action In Perception: Bradford Book. Stoffregen, T. A. (2003). Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), Turvey, M. T. (1992). Affordances and Prospective Control: An Outline of the Ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4(3), Vatrapu, R. (2007). Technological Intersubjectivity and Appropriation of Affordances in Computer Supported Collaboration. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu: Available at 9

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