#affordances

“ How well can we perceive the action opportunities available to others? What information do we use? Can we perceive nested affordances – that is, be sensitive to not only another person’s action capabilities but impending changes in their capabilities? Some implications for coaching.   

 Articles:  

Can I Choose a Throwable Object for You? Perceiving Affordances for Other Individuals 

Perceiving and Remembering Affordances for Others Are Continuous Processes 

Perceiving nested affordances for another person’s actions 

Essential kinematic information, athletic experience, and affordance perception for others  

An information-based approach to action understanding

   More information: http://perceptionaction.com/ “

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the following links:

Some advice on how to start studying the sources generally can be found in these older posts

Remember to check out  A Guide to Starting a Liberation Martial Arts Gym as it may help with your own club/gym/dojo/school culture and approach.Check out their curriculum too.

Fear is the Mind Killer: How to Build a Training Culture that Fosters Strength and Resilience by   Kajetan Sadowski   may be relevant as well.

“How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills”  by Rob Gray  as well as this post that goes over the basics of his constraints lead, ecological approach.

Another useful book to check out is  The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts (while about HEMA, a lot of it is applicable to other historical martial arts clubs dealing with research and recreation of old fighting systems).

Trauma informed coaching and why it matters

Why having a systematic approach to training can be beneficial

Why we may not want one attack 10 000 times, nor 10 000 attacks done once, but a third option.

How consent and opting in function and why it matters.

More on tactics in fencingOpen vs closed skills

The three primary factors to safety within historical fencing

Worth checking out are this blogs tags on pedagogy and teaching for other related useful posts.

Look at the previous posts in relation to running and cardio to learn how that relates to historical fencing.

And if you train any weapon based form of historical fencing check out the ‘HEMA game archive’ where you can find a plethora of different drills, focused sparring and game options to use for effective, useful and fun training.

Check out the cool hemabookshelf facsimile project.

For more on how to use youtube content for learning historical fencing I suggest checking out these older posts on the concept of video study of sparring and tournament footage.

Anyball - In Development Trailer

One aspect of procedural generation that I don’t think games use often enough generating rules and mechanics. We’ve got lots of examples of generating dungeons, landscapes, and other physical things. But for more abstract things there are way fewer things to point to.

Which is one reason why the in-development Anyball caught my attention: the players will never know the rules of the game starting out because they’re newly generated each game. I really like that aspect of procedural generation--discovery is always a fun way to use procgen techniques.

You can take discovery too far, of course: a short amount of experience with Eleusis will quickly demonstrate that humans are quite bad at figuring out complex secret rules without the affordances to guide them through the discovery process. The trick for procedural generation is that the things we generate need to have enough structure for people to anticipate what might be generated and how it relates to the rest of the world.

Fortunately for Anyball, sports equipment comes with quite a lot of affordances built in. There are both physical affordances--balls can roll when kicked--and cultural affordances--we expect that the numbers on a scoreboard will go up when we do something good. It’s a good foundation for building a generator.

ARE THOSE WHO DON’T USE SOCIAL MEDIA ANTISOCIAL?

100 years ago, people couldn’t live without champagne served in crystal coupes but nowadays (although I personally can’t live without champagne) it seems that some would possibly drop dead without being able to aimlessly scroll through their social media feeds. Without being able to see their friends and family’s every move. Without the possibility of drinking a nastily bitter cocktail (which admittedly sounded delicious when they read the concoction on the menu) only to still post a picture and brag about the branded jam jar it was served in. I’m sad to say that there are more people out there like this than you think. But what about those who aren’t involved in this glamorous, picture perfect bubble? What should we think of them?

As a social media user myself, I can’t relate to what it’s like to wake up and not know what Kim Kardashian had for her dinner the night before. But despite my exclusive knowledge of this, thanks to my Instagram feed, what about those who don’t know this, who don’t know every single detail of other people’s day to day lives? Should we label them as antisocial or is it perfectly acceptable? In my opinion it’s totally okay to not be engulfed in ‘the bubble’ and here are a few reasons why…

Firstly, by studying language and new media, I’ve realised that social media provides users with both affordances and constraints. One affordance is that mediums such as Facebook can connect you with family and friends in an online space- some may live nearby, some may live on the other side of the world, either way you can message each other and catch up regularly just with the click of a button. Although this recent way of life saves the hassle of finding a date in the diary and filling the car up with fuel, surely it has an impact on one’s physical relationships? I for one (and I hate to admit it), have realised that social media has made me lazy with my friends. Having a face-to-face conversation over a cup of coffee in a café is a rarity and making an effort to travel many miles to see family in other areas now seems unnecessary because I can tell them all about my recent holiday online. Consequently, perhaps some choose not to use social media so they don’t lose touch with the real, physical world and embrace the opportunity to make real efforts and real memories with those they love? Perhaps those who use social media are the antisocial ones?

Secondly, in a world full of career driven individuals there are some instances where being a user of social media can be a disadvantage. It won’t surprise many that being a professional in whatever in industry requires professionalism and a single social media post could throw your chances of landing your dream job completely out of the window. Unfortunately, social media doesn’t favour professionalism in the same way that a workplace does; instead, it favours funny videos of friends, endless photos of couples kissing on the beach during their honeymoon and embarrassing posts typed in the early hours of the morning after a drunken night out. These days a lot of employers do take a look at the social media of potential candidates to ensure that they’re the right person for the job and that they will admirably represent the company, therefore sometimes the best option might be to have no social media at all than to be caught out at an unexpected hurdle. So, I would suggest that in order to be taken seriously in a high-flying workplace, it’s best that your future boss doesn’t stumble across a photo of you drunkenly lying on your kitchen floor, with your superman boxers half-way down your legs, that your mate Dave tagged you in. I can assure you that those who don’t use social media don’t have to worry about this.

Finally, social media provides all users with a platform where their voice can be heard. Another affordance. However, sometimes these voices can be hurtful and judgemental towards other users.  Therefore, another constraint- social media does not allow you to share content whilst being protected from the views and comments of those who view it and this can be detrimental to self-esteem. Examples include fat shaming women who are seven months pregnant, telling a fitness blogger their advice is wrong just because they’re not a qualified personal trainer or even commenting hateful messages on someone’s post because of a difference in political views. Although I have very fortunately never experienced any of this intolerable behaviour, I can empathise with those who chose not to run the risk of being unfairly bullied. Therefore, those who don’t use social media are certainly not antisocial but undeniably considerate of their own wellbeing and happiness and are aware of the dangers that come with it.

Digitization has changed the way the world communicates. We know this right? Back in the day our ancestors would have had to send letters, smoke signals and carrier pigeons to communicate (Check out these 10 weird ways of communicating), whereas today we have the luxury of communicating via numerous social media platforms to send instant messages, share pictures and video chat. Life seems easier, right?

Unfortunately, these platforms have also allowed for wide spread negativity. Internet trolls are sweeping the web causing much havoc than ever expected. Hostile messages, abuse, deception and manipulation are all forms of trolling and it’s made social media platforms a playground of hurt. So what aspects of social media have made the job of trolls so easy?

‘Trolling has been characterised as a loose set of acts and activities, and as cultures of practice and modes of social media participation’ (Savory 2017, n.p.). But although trolling is undesirable, it is now a fact of our social media lives and is made easy through different social platforms affordances .  Journal ‘Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming’ authors Christine Cook, Juliette Schaafsma and Marjolijn Antheunis (2017) uncovered three key motivations for trolls - those being: personal enjoyment, revenge, and thrill-seeking. All at the expense of others. 

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allow for trolls to communicate with other users outside of their direct network. Therefore the disconnection is greater and the temptation for a trolls to spread their opinions or negative messaging is higher.  Boyd (2014) explains that young people use social media in a way that can create drama between peers and instead of blaming the technology or platform in which they are a user of, they should focus on the way they use the platform and better understand it’s affordances.  Do you agree? Are social media platforms making it easier to spread negativity and hatred messages? Or is society just changing? References:

Boyd, D 2014, 'Bullying: Is the Media Amplifying Meanness and Cruelty?', in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Yale University Press, New Haven, USA, pp. 128-52.

Some time ago, I came across an interesting article which suggested that many people use Facebook because they want ‘to belong’ and because they feel the need to self-present themselves (Nadkarni & Hofmann 2012). While this made sense to me, I remember wondering if these people were aware that this social media platform, much like many others, enables you to do much more than just sharing photos or posting ‘happy birthdays’. As a matter of fact, over the last few years Facebook has been releasing a number innovative tools such as Facebook Video, Facebook Live, and several others that are really useful for businesses.  

The many ways in which users interact with social media interfaces is known as ‘Affordances’. The term, which was invented decades before the arrival of the Internet, was coined by psychologist Gibson (Greeno 1994) and referred to the countless ways in which one can interact with their environment. Later, cognitive scientist Norman (1999) utilised the term to describe the potential uses that an object can have. Since social media somewhat involves these two definitions, it is not surprising that their platforms are now being analysed in terms of their affordances.

Social Behaviour Many scholars hold that social media influence our social behaviour (Butcher & Helmond 2016; Hughes, Rowe, Batey & Lee 2012). Specifically, that a user’s behaviour in any given digital community is the result of the affordances that the corresponding social media platform present. The following are two examples illustrating this scenario. Twitter Soon after its launch in 2006, this revolutionary platform quickly skyrocketed and positioned itself as one of the most popular social media sites. It was revolutionary because, while all sites encouraged users to post as much information as they wished, Twitter decided to limit each post to 140-characters. As a result of users being forced to write posts (or tweets) rather briefly, alternative ways of social interaction emerged. For example, facing the impossibility of elaborating on an idea, users often sought to convey a vehement message. Unfortunately, sometimes vehemency comes with a dose of antipathy, and when this occurs the original message can be misinterpreted.

YouTube There are enough examples to suggest that this social media platform also produced an unprecedented shift in terms of social behaviour. Among them, the possibility for users to access material that they had never seen before, such as interviews, documentaries, or even back stages of their favourite band. Likewise, it allowed users willing to share this material to express themselves through the videos they shared (as opposed to written communication). As such, by affording this salient aspect of YouTube people of this community developed an alternative way of interaction.

As it can be appreciated, each social media platform encourages a unique way of interaction, and this in turn generates certain social behaviours that are inherent to such community. If you want to learn more about this topic, I encourage you to watch the following Standford Seminar.

References

Bucher, T, & Helmond, A 2016. The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In J. Burgess, T. Poell, & A.

Hancock, J 2016, ‘Affect, affordances and the psychology of social media’, Standford Seminar, viewed November 28 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VklQ6NKlyPU>. 

Hughes, DJ, Rowe, M., Batey, M, & Lee, A 2011, ‘A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol 28, no 2, pp. 561-569.

Greeno, J 1994, ‘Gibson's affordances’, Psychological Review, vol 101, no 2, pp. 336-342.