The Affordances of Blogging
A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects
Lucas Graves Columbia University
Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 31 Number 4 October 2007
Journal of Communication Inquiry Volume 31 Number 4 October 2007
(excerpt 1)
In the following pages,I hope to suggest that,in fact,Geertz’s notion of culture,precisely because of its emphasis on vagary and variousness, does offer a useful vantagepoint for the study of media and media technology. In particular, the model of culturalemergence on which Geertz relies can add depth to the notion of technology “affordances”in a way that yields a firmer midpoint between accounts that look to the inher-ent qualities of a communications technology and those that emphasize its social construction. Affordances are the features of a technology that make a certain actionpossible; in a useful definition,they are “properties of the world defined with respect topeople’s interaction with it”(Gaver,1991,p. 80). To provide a scaffold for this discus-sion of culture, media, and affordance, I consider the emerging genre of news-relatedblogs. It may be the case that by exaggerating the basic mutability of all media—theway their essential character can vary between places and over time—blogs and otherdigital media draw our attention back to an existential whimsy that Geertz understood quite well.
(excerpt 2)
The real power of the concept of a technological “affordance”derives,I think,from the way it hints that potential exerts its own pull. Surprisingly, this sense of the term doesn’t much color Ian Hutchby’s (2001) argument for affordance as a “third way” between technological determinism and social constructivism. For Hutchby,the point is that a technology is not a blank slate that society can interpret as it pleases. As he wrote, “Different technologies possess different affordances, and these affordances constrain the ways they can possibly be ‘written’ or ‘read’”(p. 447; emphasis in original). This narrow reading misses the added point that sometimes an affordance is an invitation—a sense present both in the everyday verb “to afford” and in the roots of affordance in cognitive psychology. As Hutchby has noted, psychologist J. J. Gibson (1986) argued that animals perceive the objects around them directly in terms of affordance; for the lizard, at a fundamental level, the rock means shelter. The idea of an action invited becomes clearest in the literature of design, where, for instance, the particular bend of a door handle is said to afford either pushing or pulling.
(excerpt 3)
One such affordance of blogging might be dubbed “many eyeballs,”after the open- source software dictum that “given enough eyeballs,all bugs are shallow.” Rather than focusing the expertise of a few professionals, the open-source community reveals the innards of its software code to as many people as possible,relying on sheer numbers to discover buried errors or solve intractable problems. In the blogosphere, both original reporting and (more often) fact checking operate under a similar principle.
(excerpt 4)
Another affordance of blogging is fixity, although a different form of it than the quality Eisenstein attributed to print. Broadcast and even print news can be fairly ephemeral; reports that don’t achieve a critical mass of attention may fade quickly from sight. For citizen as well as reporter,recovering the precise details of a proposal or the exact wording of a leader’s remarks requires some effort. News-related blogs (and Web sites generally) constitute a sort of global bulletin board on which to affix jarring or incongruent facts so they can be easily recovered, safe from the amnesiac grind of the news cycle.
(excerpt 5)
Closely related to fixity is another crucial affordance of blogs,one so obvious that it is easy to overlook:juxtaposition. News-related blogs specialize in the sort of analysis that Political Animal ran on December 19, pulling together arguments, statements, or reports from multiple sources (or from the same source at different times) and placing them side by side to tease out the implications. This sounds suspiciously like “thinking”— the kind of analysis that any good reporter would perform. But a reporter faces con- straints—meeting deadlines, appearing objective, writing for limited space, finding timely “hooks”for analysis, and so on—that don’t apply to bloggers.
(excerpt 6)
This reading focuses attention squarely on genre as the intersection of technology and society:Technology and sociocultural practice evolve together, each feeding back into the other,to constitute a genre such as “blogs”or even “news-related blogs.”Genre, in this sense of a manifest set of communicative affordances, applies as easily to tele- phone conversations or 16th-century books as it does to blogging. In each case, the genre is constrained by the affordances of the underlying technology; more to the point, though, a genre embodies what those emerging technological capabilities suggest to a particular society at a given moment, giving the technology meaning and purpose in human affairs. In this respect,genre can be considered part of the mechanism of emer- gence, giving expression to features and norms that a developing technology has just made possible—or perhaps is just on the cusp of making possible.
(excerpt 7)
Likewise, it’s tempting to look at the past decade and argue that the Internet has had a democratizing influence on news in the United States, prying open the organs of news production and making journalists more accountable to their audience. Given the characteristics of each,we want to be able to say that the outcome of their collision makes sense, even that it was inevitable. But were we clamoring for news democracy before the Web came along? If we were,are blogs what we had in mind? A technology like print or the Internet exerts a general pull on history—but only because particular genres of communication provide a crucible for technological possibility and social intent to evolve together. The paradox that Geertz wants us to understand is that embracing the particular offers a window onto the universal—and a way to talk, I think, about the influence of communications technology in human affairs. As he wrote, “Seeing heaven in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish”(Geertz, 1973, p. 44).
