Since water flows to lower places, people once believed rivers simply filled ravines and canyons made by God or earthquakes. In the 19th century, Charles Lyell revealed the opposite: rivers make canyons. Rivers aren’t the “effect” of canyons—canyons are the effect of rivers.
It’s the same with media effects. Media technologies did not emerge to fit human conditions; on the contrary, media always created human conditions, just as creeks carve ravines and rivers cut canyons—not the other way around.
Then the question arises: why do media emerge at all? What drives them? And what drives media evolution—if not human choice, human genius, or socio-historical conditions?
Media evolution is driven by the technological imperative: the emergent force that makes any technology “seek” better performance. Once humans learned to operate with nature instrumentally, they selected what works and what doesn’t, providing “natural selection” for media.
The technological imperative extends its power over humans by affording us the ability to extract benefits from using media. Different media afford us different benefits, driving our selecting engagement with them. This selectivity is described by the concept of affordance.
The concept was introduced by psychologist James Gibson in the 1960s. He suggested that any environment dictates how to operate. You can swim or dive in a lake, but not walk on it. The materiality of things offers a range of interactions, and the user picks the optimal one.
Things around us tell us what we can or cannot do with them. Gibson quoted Kurt Koffka, who wrote in 1935, “Each thing says what it is. … A fruit says ‘Eat me’; water says ‘Drink me’; thunder says ‘Fear me.’” [i]
The concept of affordance was extended by Donald Norman, who suggested applying it in technological design so that users would know how to use a tool or technology. For example, you cannot pull a door with a plate—you realize at once that you need to push it.
Affordance illustrates the “compelling” power of media. Just like Vito Corleone, media make us offers we can’t refuse. As long as a medium offers some convenience (an extension in time and space), we can’t help but use it in the way that the affordance of this medium dictates.
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There are hard affordances—they offer only certain ways of interacting with objects, such as a door with a metal plate or, say, stairs; and there are soft affordances, when media can be interacted with in various ways but still invite users to choose a “preferable” use.
For example, social media seemingly provide a variety of applications. Users can chat, look for friends and useful information, promote themselves, ideas, or businesses, create communities, and so on. You’d think you could use social media for whatever you want.
But social media design serves ad targeting, shaping their hard affordance: increasing engagement. This favors behaviors that trigger stronger responses, pushing users toward extremes. Whatever opportunities social media offer, their ultimate affordance leads to polarization.
Individually, we can withdraw or abstain, but as a society, we’ve been given an offer we can’t refuse. Society can’t help but engage more and more on social media and become more polarized. Their affordance—even a seemingly soft, inviting affordance—in fact compels.
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In any ecosystem, affordances are more powerful than restrictions. Restrictions can be resisted, even overturned. But affordances are intangible—they shape behavior unnoticeably. It’s hard to resist what you don’t sense. Mass resistance to affordances is impossible.
The principle of affordance is captured in the saying, “To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail.” The opposite, “Guns don’t kill, people do,” is wrong: guns are designed to pierce living flesh from a distance. This affordance—not just human intent—shapes outcomes.
Affordances disregard human personal attitudes. All humans are the same to media when it comes to extending humans in space and time in exchange for developing media. This uniting power of media converts media as tools into media as environmental forces.
For example, when used by a person, a fence is a tool of protection—a further extension of the skin beyond clothes and huts. But since it works well, a community begins to use it—and the fence becomes a force that transforms a nomadic tribe into a sedentary society.
This is where the environmental power of media affordances comes from. What seems to be just the instrumental use of a medium in an isolated act (or a series of acts) becomes an environmental force when the user is not an individual but an entire culture.
Affordances make media not just environmental but terraforming forces. A species with a natural econiche similar to that of apes, wolves, or wild hogs has turned the entire planet into its econiche—because of media and their affordances. Media reshaped Earth to accommodate us.
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The power of media over users and their environments went largely unrecognized for a long time. Just as people once thought canyons attracted rivers, they believed societies at certain stages invented media that suited their social and economic needs.
It’s not surprising—the very concept of media emerged from 1950s–60s communication theories. At the time, communication was seen either through political messaging (propaganda) or as transmitting signals from sender to receiver (information theory, cybernetics).
Media were seen as means of communication and within a utilitarian paradigm: what people can achieve while communicating through media. This logic was reflected in the famous Lasswell formula, “Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?” (1948).[ii]
The Lasswell formula with corresponding elements of the communication process. A graphic variation by McQuail and Windahl.[iii]
Harold Lasswell was a political scientist, sociologist, and communication theorist. But his formula turned out to be almost identical to the one proposed by information theorists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949.
Shannon and Weaver’s communication model, 1949.[iv]
Essentially, all those theories explored how a signal is transmitted from point A to point B, with what losses, and what effect the transmitted information (message) produces on the receiving end—be it political masses or a technical device.
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Marshall McLuhan reversed the understanding of media with his famous “The medium is the message.” It is the media themselves, not the transmitted information, that produce the effect—and not only on the receiving side but on all involved and on society as a whole.
McLuhan said other communication theories studied transportation, while he studied transformation—what happens to people using media. Media ecology is a reversal of communication theories: they study what people do with media; media ecology studies what media do to people.
Same as with canyons and rivers, this idea had long been counterintuitive and seen as provocative. How is it that a hammer does something to the man who wields it? Or that a fence changes those who put it up? TV news informs us—but what does the TV itself do?
In media ecology, following the McLuhan paradigm, all of these are media. They mediate human operations with and within environments by extending human faculties and changing both humans and environments—reshaping the “human condition” [v] according to their affordances.
The transformative effects of mechanical tools are indeed hard to detect. The effect of electronic media was so intense that people began recognizing it. Still, they mostly focused on the content, linking outcomes to the content of media and trying to fix the content.
Social—and more broadly, digital—media are completing the reversal in understanding media that McLuhan began. Their impact on society is so vast and undeniable that people now sense it intuitively: it’s the media themselves, not their content, that change human life and society.
