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The Affordances of Digital Technologies in Public Space

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Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

Abstract

This chapter discusses the broad palette of actions that constitute digitally mediated public spatial practices, and introduces the concept of affordances, and in particular the “social affordances” of digital technologies to delineate the ways in which these technologies are appropriated by different agents in the mediated city to co-construct the public realm. Affordances are not characteristics of technologies alone nor of people alone, but rather are measures of the interfaces where technological potential meets human intention and desire. The implications of digital technologies’ affordances for the governance and commodification of public space are discussed, as well as for the practice of urban citizenship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this distinction, though, the concept of space should not be essentialized nor indeed reified as if it were something given and neutral. The human-made material-spatial constructs that are the precondition and platform for public space are of course in themselves also manifestations of the application of technologies by agents—the traces of past and present applications of power, money and technology, and the ongoing site and object of modifications (through augmentation, editing and destruction) to this material-spatiality by the interplay of agents in the present. This pertains as much to the old technologies of architecture and physical infrastructure as the new digital technologies of surveillance and communication.

  2. 2.

    This is related to Gibson’s lack of distinction between humans and other animals as regards affordances.

  3. 3.

    Much of the research into the social affordances of digital technologies within specific contexts of use has been conducted on the area of education, arriving at various insights. By way of example, two such studies yield a list of five (engagement, powerful teaching conversations, complex tasks, in-site and on-site support, and connections and visibility) or alternatively ten (accessibility, speed of change, diversity, communication and collaboration, reflection, multi-modal and non-linear, risk fragility and uncertainty, immediacy, monopolization and surveillance) affordances of digital technologies for teaching and learning in schools. A more elaborated discussion of the affordances of digital technologies in education draws on the potentials offered by these technologies to increase students’ motivation to learn; to contextualize learning through interactivity; to enable immersion and continual formative feedback, to support students’ demonstration of what they have learned; to enable collaboration and communication in the learning process; and to adapt to different needs and paces of different students (compiled from a number of sources. The breadth and depth of the scope with which the concept of affordances has been brought to bear on the role of digital technologies in the school and the classroom, and the variety of affordances identified because of the different hypotheses and conceptual framings of different researchers, serves to all the more strongly illustrate the relative lack of application of this perspective to the understanding of the equally important and complex socio-cultural and spatial-material context of public space.

  4. 4.

    And the 2G mobile phone is in turn obsolesced by the smart phone.

  5. 5.

    including the relationships within other-than-human (technological) actors, and the relations between these actors and human individuals and publics.

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  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Timothy Jachna

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Jachna, T. (2021). The Affordances of Digital Technologies in Public Space. In: Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_7

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