Thinking About The Concept of Affordance

Beginning from the second chapter of Multimodal Composition, Selfe incorporates the idea of affordances of various technology and modalities into the teaching of multimodal writing. I found this concept which is used more often in digital composition worthy of exploring no matter in teaching of multimedia and multimodal writing or of alphabetic literacy.

Selfe introduces the idea of affordances as “the particular capabilities of sound, video, or still images” (17), which is one of the key items on the curriculum of teaching composition with audio and video. Keller later interprets it as “capabilities of representing meaning in particular ways and in certain contexts” with his rhetorical approach of examination. In all, the concept of affordance offers a concrete representation of the rhetorical capabilities of multimedia elements such as sound or images, motional or still. Aside from these interpretations, I want to trace back the definition of the word a bit more and thus portraying it as a concept that writing instructors can employ to assist teaching the general idea of rhetorical effectiveness, especially to inexperienced student writers.

The word affordance is said to be first coined by Gibson in 1977 in his theorization of perception. Aside from its physical sense of sustainability, he proposes that perception encodes what the external world affords the perceiver. The idea of affordance is unique in that it is primitive aspects of the physical makeup of the world, but it spans through the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity. For example, it is acknowledged that baby chairs are for babies and regular chairs for teenagers and adults based on the standard of weight and size that a chair can support. But it is not to say that some baby chairs cannot bear the average weight of adults, it is merely a problem of fitness. Hence, it is based on perception that the affordances of a chair is determined. In this sense, affordances represent both objective and subjective values. In other words, articulation of affordances can be an ability to represent abstraction out of entities.

In this sense, the concept of affordances can be transplanted to the learning of alphabetic literacy as well. It is parallel to the rhetorical effectiveness of writing formats, words, sentences or many other literary techniques. As students are usually not familiar with the notion of rhetoric and its functioning, introducing the affordances of certain objects can be a good place to start with in teaching the capability and meaning of textual as well as visual or audio elements. Articulating affordances is a good site to exercise with in building student writers’ awareness of rhetorical effects and competencies. It is also capable of expanding their agency in developing organized analysis of subject matters.