I generally find Gibson’s sense of the term to be more useful as a critical category. We might ask questions like “what are the affordances of this technology\/method?”<\/strong>or “Are they\u00a0taking advantages of the affordances available to them?”\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Such questions prove to be especially useful, as an example, if we look at the New York Times<\/em><\/a> online and ask whether that publication\u00a0is really fully utilizing the communication strategies available with an online publication or whether they are really just porting their print journalism over to a digital\u00a0space. We might ask whether they are using images, video, audio, or data visualization effectively and deeply, and whether the nature of how they do journalism shifts substantively when it’s in a digital space because there are different possibilities available to them to explore.<\/p>\n I might also ask you whether you are taking advantage of the affordances offered because you are publishing your work for this class to the web. If you approach all of the assignments this semester by opening a new document in MS Word and writing traditional 4-page essays and then you just paste them onto a page of your site and hit publish, then what opportunities are you missing to communicate your ideas in this space? How might you approach your writing differently for this class now that your website has different affordances available to it then were available when you typed an essay and printed it out?<\/p>\n Just as every technology or method has certain affordances available to it, they also have the inverse: constraints. Constraints are limitations imposed by that technology, which limit the ways in which you can use that technology. In our context, we’ll probably most often use the term to ask whether a publication manages to creatively work around certain constraints that are imposed by a system<\/strong>, or whether they have mistakenly chosen a method of production or publication that brings with it constraints that undermine key aspects of their project<\/strong>.<\/p>\n For example, we might ask whether George Pullman undermines his primary goals by choosing to publish Writing Online<\/em> as a print book, losing the ability to search, link, copy and paste, and so on. Pullman devotes a fair amount of space in his introduction to addressing exactly these questions and explains why the affordances available in the print book and the additional publication of the online companion to the text serve to ameliorate such constraints, but they are still fair questions for us to consider.<\/p>\n Moving forward, when you communicate with other people, I hope that you’ll learn to at least implicitly, if not actually explicitly, think critically about whether the methods you choose to do so provide affordances that allow you to do effectively without also bringing along constraints that will undermine your efforts. And once you have thought about the affordances and constraints a technology brings with it, you might find that there are ways to\u00a0hack the technology such that you can do more with it, and avoid the limitations, in order to be more successful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I use the terms “affordances” and “constraints” fairly frequently, and I think they will be very useful terms for you to consider when you’re working on your podcast episodes, so I want to give you at least a basic sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"dwc-title":["Image Credit"],"dwc-content":["Hopsctoch<\/em> by Julio Cort\u00e1zar<\/a>\r\n\r\nI chose this image for this post because of the way in whichCort\u00e1zar hacked the form of the novel to produce what was essentially a hypertext novel in 1963<\/a>. Instead of chapters, the novel is published in numbered sections and then instead of a Table of Contents, there is a Table of Instructions:\r\n\r\nConstraints<\/h2>\n
Why affordances and constraints are such useful terms<\/h2>\n
![](\"http:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/hopscotch-table-of-instructions-272x300.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nWhen I first read the novel when I was in college, I spent forever puzzling over the fact that in Cort\u00e1zar's second method, the reader jumps over section 55 entirely and never reads it, and at the end the reader is instructed to read section 131, then 58, then 131 again. And in his first method of reading the novel, the last two hundred pages are left out entirely. I read and re-read section 55, trying to figure out what its exclusion meant. I had never read a novel that pushed me to think so carefully about my underlying assumptions about reading, like that we start at the beginning and read to the end or that everything included in the novel was essential to its meaning. I think of Hopscotch<\/em> as pushing the boundaries of perceived affordances and fighting against the constraints of the genre of the novel."],"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eng221s17.davidmorgen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}