>I had been entertaining notions which discuss the "affordances of particular
>cultural tools" for this or that kind of activity in terms of a mediated
>action account. In Jim Wertsch's terms, this has in part to do with possible
>"spin-off" effects of cultural tools as they are appropriated in activity.
> Cultural tools inevitably get used in ways that diverge from their "home
>activity" or the activity for which they were designed. In part, I was
>thinking this could be explained in terms of the "affordances" of the tools
>for different kinds of activity.
>
>Eugene shifted the frame a bit for me to suggest that mediation _overcomes_
>affordances in the activity setting. In other words (and correct me if I'm
>misinterpreting), affordances have to do with object-activity or
>activity-environment gestalts, and that mediation overcomes affordances by
>transforming what particular actions different activity settings "afford."
My reading of Gibson's notion of affordance is that it is a relational,
systemic concept. In other words, an affordance is not just "in" an
environment; it is in the relation between some aspect of the environment
(seen as dynamic, not static) and an organism (e.g., the surface of a lake
does not afford walking to a human, but does to some kinds of insects).
For humans and other organisms that learn, affordances then are not simply
biological. And as activity theory points out, the "environment" is itself
massively transformed by human activity.
In this sense, it seems to me both true that mediational means transform
affordances and that they afford. In other words, the unit of analysis is
something more like a notion of functional systems as dynamic, fluid,
distributed, and situated constructions (I'm thinking here particularly of
Hutchin's use of functional systems in _Cognition in the Wild_). In this
sense then, you can't *really* separate out the activity setting from the
persons from the tools, although our language and our need to analyze
activity may encourage or require us to do so.
________________
Paul Prior
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu