Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Affordance and Manipulanda

What does a network afford?

I'm setting out with hopes that I can wrap together a few thought-strands running through other coursework this week. It tracks through Weinberger, as well, so the application here isn't out of the blue.  In his chapter on Space in Small Pieces Loosely Joined Weinberger says, "Our space is full of opportunities, obstacles and dangers, or what the psychologist James Gibson called affordances (e.g., the chair affords us the possibility of sitting) and the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the ready-to-hand" (32).  I can't remember if I'd learned about affordances before this semester; seems like a basketball coach once hollered something about the affordances of the game:  playing through potentials and opportunism constantly responsive to in-game context, or something.  But maybe not.

Whatever the case, affordances came up in other reading this week. This succinct bit comes from a 1974 essay from Bransford and McCarrell called "A Sketch of a Cognitive Approach to Comprehension," and it matched up nicely, I think, with another term--manipulanda--and, as well, some of our conversation last week about characterizing network literacy (whatever you call it):

The notion of a nonarbitrary relation between what something looks like and what it means is related to J.J. Gibson's (1966) notion of affordances.  Certain objects and their properties provide visual information for the activities and interactions they afford.  So, for example, sharp objects afford piercing, certain extensions (e.g., handles) afford grasping, hardness affords pounding, and roundness affords rolling.  Even surfaces afford activities since they are 'walk-onable,' 'climbable,' and the like.  Tolman (1958) presented similar notions in his essay on 'sign-gestalts.' These are not simply information about 'the larger wholes in which the perceived configuration will itself be embedded as one term in a larger means-end proposition [p. 79]." Tolman further introduced the term "manipulanda" which he defines as:

properties of objects which support (or make possible) motor manipulations of the species...One and the same environmental object will afford quite different manipulanda to an animal which possesses hands from what it can and will to an animal which possesses only a mouth, or only a bill, on only claws...grasp-ableness, pick-up-ableness, throw-ableness, heaviness (heave-ableness) and the like--these are manipulanda [p. 82].

Basically, I'd like to propose the inclusion of these terms in the network(ed) rhetorics glossary (wanna second it?).  I'm finding these terms/concepts helpful for understanding many of the paradoxes Weinberger works through and many of the tensions surrounding the assignment of genres to weblogs (or weblogs to genres).  It's as if we have available to us an abundance of digital manipulanda--affordance-ness with the network and with our related involvements. 

What does a web(log) afford?  A link?  A network?

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Posted by Derek Mueller at February 15, 2005 3:18 PM to Networks