RING RING, A NEW SET OF PHONES ARE IN

IWhat Can the Smartest of Phones Afford?

Telephone by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVBsypHzF3U

(A little flashback to when Lady Gaga was in her provocateur phase)

From the acoustic tin can telephone, to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone invention in 1876, to dial up phones, to the digital devices we know and love today, telephones have undergone a huge leap from their invention to their internet, data, touch, media, text, and call capabilities of today. Thin, light, portable, and fast, todays phones are tiny gadgets that we rely on heavily and most of us can’t leave the house without. When your phone dies out in a crowd just as you are trying to find someone, you panic. We’ve all been there, most recently for me as I awaited a ride home from the bustling streets of Music Midtown at Piedmont Park. What do I do without it? What if I can’t call my ride? What if I can’t send my location? What happens if they pass me and can’t see me? What if they leave me?.......Does this sound like the antics of a crazy person? Well, maybe, but how many of us have gone through this moment where we don’t know how we will fulfill a task without our smartphones? Sad as it may be, we pull out our phones when we need google, directions, coupons, a ride home, and the list goes on.

The phone is a digital medium today that prescribes to Janet Murray's ‘four affordances of a digital medium’ as procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. The best way to understand an affordance was explained like this to me: “an affordance is a quality of an object, which allows an individual to perform an action. A knob affords twisting, a cord affords pulling.” So the four affordances of a digital medium, as described by Murray, can therefore be evaluated for accuracy through the example of the telephone.

Murray prescribes that any digital format or genre, or anything made of electronic bits is potentially:

1. Procedural (“composed of executable rules”)

2. At first I was confused by this affordance, I’ll admit. Aren’t most things ‘procedural’ if you define it as ‘composed of executable rules’? So that’s why I think this affordance is the part of the phone we take most advantage of and don’t even notice. The rules of the medium of the phone are programed into the device so that when the individual performs a certain function the telephone responds coherently. When I press the ‘on’ button of my phone I expect the screen to brighten and turn on. When I turn up the volume on my phone I expect it to go up, not down. In the same way, when I tap on an app I expect it to perform and exist in a form and function similar to how the site works on the computer platform. In this way, the telephones programmed to follow exact rules so that the device is functionable for the individual.

1. *Participatory (“inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world”)

2. This is probably the most obvious affordance of a phone. With the internet, text, call, and social media apps on our smartphones, the phone in nature is inherently participatory and has become even more so since its invention. Calling on the telephone invited people to contact others from longer distances, and in shorter time. Texting in the late 20th, early 21st century allowed further connectivity, with more response time flexibility. Now, our smartphones allow us to send pictures and videos, go live on video on an app, FaceTime, airdrop, and Bluetooth, while also still having the ‘basic talk and text’, as the phone companies say. This plethora of functions and possibilities allows the phone to be participatory to all with diverse interests, different time constraints, and connectivity needs.

1. Encyclopedic (“containing very high capacity of information in multiple media formats”)

2. The phone in its modern adaptation has a huge capacity for information. From apps to search platforms to music to the internet to search histories to specifically tailored ads, your phone has the capability to collect and remember vast amounts of information which, scary to some, just kind of of stays out there and never really goes away-- So watch watch you put out there on any digital device, kids!

3. Beyond its capacity for storage, information, and app-internet capabilities, our mobile phones allow for many media formats to be transmitted at the touch of a screen. Many of us probably check these social media apps ten, fifteen, twenty? times, maybe even more, a day.

1. Spatial (“navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place”)

2. As an extension to the telephones capacity for information storage I mentioned earlier, the telephones spatial affordance denotes its ability to be a deposit for information and storage on numerous, unlimited virtual platforms. When you go and change your profile and pictures on Instagram or Facebook on your mobile app, that information is stored in the virtual world so that the next time you access the app again or go to the site on your laptop, the profile changes will still be there. In this way, this virtual space that you participate in with your smartphone, stores and files away information in according ways so that it is speedily retransmitted to the user when needed.

“So yeah they fit”, you may think, but what do these four affordances really mean to us as users? How or why should I appreciate that these affordances exist?

Simply because, these affordances of a digital medium didn’t always exist. Technology was not always on the level that is is today with its advanced capabilities and a whole ‘virtual’ world with a mind of its own. Through our long technological evolution, we have created these spatial, encyclopaedic, procedural, and participatory possibilities on a digital, virtual, and technological scale that must have rules, prescriptions, norms, predictors, and culture, just as any other component in society. Looking at these four affordance can serve as a marker for further evolution of digital mediums and may unveil what the consequences of those mediums could be. Being sure that we stay connected through the use of digital devices, while not going too far as to let these devices consume our lives and inadvertently disconnect us.

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(One example of the possible progression of technology to a point of an adverse effect on humans can be seen in Black Mirror’s depiction of future societies wrapped up in technology. It warns of the possibilities of evolving our technology to the point that innovation in digital mediums becomes destructive.)