Affordances we can’t refuse
Just like Vito Corleone, media make us offers we can’t refuse. Affordances illustrate the compelling power of media.
Unlike animals living in a natural environment with its natural affordances, humans live in a man-made environment shaped by our technologies—by our media. Human environmental affordances are media affordances. The concept of affordance is central to media ecology. Excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
You cannot walk on water unless you’re Jesus or a Jesus lizard. Water affords only swimming, gliding, diving, or sinking. The materiality of the environment dictates the ways in which we can interact with it. Based on the verb “afford,” psychologist James Gibson coined the term affordance in the late 1960s to describe the kinds of interactions an environment makes available to its inhabitants.
Different affordances are offered by different elements of the “terrestrial environment.” Affordances, however, describe not the innate physical characteristics of these elements but rather the compatibility of users with those characteristics. For example, the affordances of water are not the same for humans, swans, and fish. Each of these “users” has its own “compatibility” with water.
Affordances are not just possibilities for use: they invite users to act in certain ways. In the 1980s and later, Donald Norman extended Gibson’s theory of affordances to technological design and human-computer interaction. He wrote:
Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.[1]
A “Norman door” is a famous metaphor for failed design, in which a door’s appearance gives misleading cues about how it should be used. It describes a door whose design—its handle, plate, shape, or placement—makes people push when they should pull, or pull when they should push, often requiring extra signs or instructions to compensate.
Ironically, Don Norman, a usability advocate who taught designers to exploit affordances and used confusing doors to illustrate bad design, ended up with his name attached to a design failure in which affordances mislead rather than guide.
Things around us tell us what we can or cannot do with them. Among the predecessors who helped shape his concept, Gibson quoted Kurt Koffka, who wrote in his 1935 book Principles of Gestalt Psychology: “Each thing says what it is. ... A fruit says ‘Eat me’; water says ‘Drink me’; thunder says ‘Fear me’.”[2]
Unlike animals living in a natural environment with its natural affordances, humans live in a man-made environment shaped by the interfaces and products of our technologies—by our media. The affordances of the human environment are media affordances. The concept of affordance is therefore central to media ecology.
Just like Vito Corleone, environments make us offers we can’t refuse. The concept of affordance illustrates the compelling power of media. As long as a medium offers some convenience (an extension in time and space), we cannot help but use it in the ways its affordances dictate. Affordance is a manifestation of environmental passive aggression. A metaphorical illustration of this is a stranger politely holding a door for you well in advance of your reaching it, thus making you hurry; this stranger creates an affordance for you, and you have to fit in.
Some affordances could be called hard affordances—they offer only certain ways of interacting with objects, such as a door with a metal plate or a staircase. You can only push that door or walk up and down those stairs. Other environments offer soft affordances: they can be interacted with in a variety of ways but still invite users to choose a “preferred” use.
For example, social media seemingly provide a variety of applications. Users can chat, look for friends and useful information, promote themselves and their businesses, create communities, or organize political action. You’d think you could use social media simply to do what you want. But the design of social media is aimed at maximizing engagement for better ad targeting. This design favours behaviours that elicit stronger responses, and such behaviours are more likely to consist of salient rather than modest manifestations. In other words, whatever opportunities social media provide, their ultimate environmental affordance leads to the amplification of extremes and, eventually, to polarization. Individually, we can withdraw or abstain, but, as a society, we’ve been given an offer we can’t refuse. Society cannot help but engage more and more on social media and become more polarized. Affordance—even a seemingly soft, inviting affordance—in fact, compels.
In any ecosystem, affordances are more powerful than restrictions. Restrictions can be resisted; mass resistance to restrictions can even generate enough force to overturn the ecosystem. Unlike restrictions, affordances are intangible, as they shape behaviour imperceptibly. It is hard to resist something you do not sense. Mass resistance to affordances is impossible.
Another approach to the theory of affordances can be found within the framework of systems theory. In his Media Ecology, Lance Strate refers to the “relationship of downward causation.” Any part of a system has a set of functions predefined by its role within the system. Strate writes:
Downward causality is the causality of the environment in relation to that which it contains, or the system to its parts, and it is a causality based on constraints, rather than the positive impetus of efficient cause.[3]
The system “obliges” its parts through downward causality. A piece of a puzzle must fit the picture. A wolf occupies its place in the food chain. An actor must perform their role in a play. A footballer must play a certain position on the team. The game invites him to do certain things, while their role on the team constrains him. Downward causality can be seen as a type of environmental affordance. If you are part of a system, the system is your environment, and the affordance it offers is likely to be a rather hard one—not merely inviting, but often dictating.
Keeping the concept of environmental affordances in mind, it is quite justifiable to state that, yes, the stirrup caused feudalism. And, yes, wolves changed the Yellowstone ecosystem. And, yes, electricity created the global village. Place the concept of environmental affordances behind such “techno-deterministic” statements, and you will see that this is an ecological, not technological, kind of determinism: media determinism.
Robert Logan, who, taking a cue from McLuhan, established the connection between the alphabet and monotheism, does not insist on direct causality. “It is not possible to establish any causal relations or direct impacts,” he states. But his wording implies the role of environmental affordances, too:
We shall find, however, that the alphabet provided a climate in which abstract notions such as monotheism, codified law, science, and logic could flourish.[4]
I’d go further and say that his concept implies that, yes, monotheism, codified law, abstract science, and deductive logic were, indeed, effects of the alphabet, as the title of his book, The Alphabet Effect, directly suggests. Phonetic writing introduced symbols that bore no resemblance to what they signified. This placed the minds of its users at a level of abstraction that had previously been unattainable: mental constructions became completely detached from sensory experience. In turn, abstraction untethered from sensory reality afforded the concept of the spiritual absolute, which happened to be beneficial for the Hebrews, the inventors of the proto-alphabet, in their struggle for national identity against the surrounding polytheistic powers. The spiritual absolute—one God above all—turned out to be superior to the cohorts of Egyptian or Babylonian gods-specialists with their ancient craft-magic. Monotheism is the ultimate development—and the ultimate affordance—of the symbolic abstraction brought about by phonetic writing.
The compelling affordance of media does not mean that a medium, wherever and whenever it is introduced, automatically leads to a predetermined and identical response in any ecosystem. The affordances of a medium interact with other environmental affordances and shape unique equilibria under different conditions. Nevertheless, the affordances of a given medium form recognizable patterns of environmental response. The ecological determinism of media gives us an optic through which to see the logic of historical processes. Moreover, history itself is linear and progressive precisely because of the logic of media evolution.
Interestingly, we tend to believe more in the transformative power of the wheel than in that of papyrus. In this regard, Postman writes:
We have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance.[5]
The notion of clay tablets causing Sumerian urbanization, papyrus causing the Roman Empire, or the alphabet causing monotheism may sound reductionist, indeed; however, the statement “The Internet has changed everything” is entirely acceptable. This is either because the terraforming power of media has grown over time or because we did not fully understand the environmental effects of past media.
Read more about affordances, the Alphabet Effect, digital orality, and media ecology in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
See other books by Andrey Mir:
NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] Norman, Donald. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things, p. 9.
[2] Gibson, James. (1986 [1979]). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 138.
[3] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 178.
[4] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 143.
[5] Postman, Neil. (2006 [1985]). Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 157.