Social affordance is a type of affordance. It refers to the properties of an object or environment that permit social actions. Social affordance is most often used in the context of a social technology such as Wiki, Chat and Facebook applications and refers to sociotechnical affordances. Social affordances emerge from the coupling between the behavioral and cognitive capacities of a given organism and the objective properties of its environment.
Contents
- Affordance
- The evolution of social affordances
- Social affordances in human robot interaction
- Social affordances in interaction design
- Social affordances and human computer interaction
- Factors that influence social affordance
- Types of social software
- Social affordances trends in social software
- References
Social affordances - or more accurately sociotechnical affordances - refer as reciprocal interactions between a technology application, its users, and its social context. These social interactions include users’ responses, social accessibility and society related changes. Social affordances are not synonymous with mere factual, statistical frequency; on the contrary, the social normality of primitive forms of coordination can become normative, even in primate societies. A good example clarifies social affordance as followed: “ A wooden bench is supposed to have a sit affordance. A hiker who has walked for hours and passes the wooden bench on a walk along small country roads might perceive the sit affordance of the wooden bench as a function of the degree of fatigue. A very tired hiker will sit on the wooden bench but will not lie down (unless the wooden bench also has a lie affordance). A still fit hiker, however, might not even pick up on the sit affordance of the bench and pass it. The wooden bench is in that case no more than a piece of wood with no further meaning.”
Affordance
Affordance is a term introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson. In his 1979 book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception", he writes: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarily of the animal and the environment”
Possibilities for motor action — or what Gibson termed affordances — depend on the match between environmental conditions and actors’ physical characteristics. An example can clarify this term; when a person goes through a door, either the person is thin enough or the door is wide enough to let the person get in. Affordances are relational properties; they are neither in the environment nor in the perceiver, but are derived from the ecological relationship between the perceiver and the perceived so that the perceiver and perceived are logically interdependent. This psychological term then evolves for uses in many fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human–computer interaction, interaction design, instructional design and artificial intelligence.
The evolution of social affordances
The term affordance is first used in human-computer interaction in the 1980s by Norman with the term perceived affordance. Relevant publications were: Gaver‘s seminal articles on technology affordance in 1991, affordances of media spaces in 1992, affordances for interaction, and then Bradner‘s notion of social affordance, where social affordances are action possibilities for social behavior. Social affordance is at first used in Computer Supported Collaboration Learning experiments. Computer support collaboration learning applications and users’ interactions are the major issue in social affordance. Social affordances are properties of Computer Supported Collaboration Learning environments which act as social-contextual facilitators relevant for the learner’s social interactions. This term afterwards applies to other human-computer interactions including human cognition responses, visual perceptions and it also refers to the ecological relationship between human and computers.
Social affordances in human-robot interaction
Social affordance in the context of human-robot interaction (HRI) refers to the action possibilities offered by the presence of a set of social agents. Though not frequently used in the HRI community, except for Uyanik et al. and Shu et al., social affordance pertains to the many human-robot interaction problems and studies.
Social affordances in interaction design
Affordance firstly refers to designs that offering visual perception or cognition of its users' insight usages of the designs. The designs in software then accept the idea of affordance and expand the concept to social affordance in human and computer interactions. In social affordance, they offer possibilities to act from the users. The ecological relationships from users and designs build the social affordance in interaction design. For example, hats are for put on the heads. Mailing boxes are for letters.
Social affordances and human-computer interaction
Human-computer interactions were proposed by the effects that arise from the human and computer interactions in computer assisted education software. It later expands its usage to any social interaction between computer related applications and its users. In computer assisted education software, social affordance is evaluated with five characteristics: Accessibility, Contextualisation, Professional learning, Communities, Learning design, Adaptability. Social affordance in interactive website also exists. Evaluations of social affordances in websites have focused on some of the following features: Tagging, User Profiles, Activity Streams, Comments, Ratings and Votes. These social affordances allow users to be aware of other users’ opinions, thoughts and feedback and, in so doing, help to engage users and build social connections.
Factors that influence social affordance
Types of social software
There is much social software in web, summary as followed:
Multi-player online gaming environments / virtual worlds
Discourse facilitation systems
Content management systems
Product development systems
Peer-to-peer file sharing systems
Selling/purchasing management systems
Learning management systems
Relationship management systems
Syndication systems
Distributed classification systems (“folksonomies”)