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Paper short abstract

Drawing on media anthropology in Morocco’s High Atlas, this paper asks: What must affordances presuppose? Ethnographic analysis of a technology learning space reveals how digital tools require pedagogical and infrastructural work that participatory design methodologies often render invisible.

Paper long abstract

Digital anthropologists have extended Gibson's concept of affordance to examine how technological design and social practice co-produce possibilities and constraints of digital life. Building on insights that affordances are relational and enacted through practice, this paper foregrounds a dimension requiring further attention: the infrastructural and pedagogical conditions through which affordances become accessible.

Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork within an interdisciplinary research project between anthropology and HCI, I examine a technology learning intervention in Morocco's High Atlas. The project introduced digital tools—laptops, cameras, recording equipment—into an NGO's educational infrastructure, following participatory design principles aimed at enabling self-directed technology learning. Media ethnographic attention to everyday practices revealed fundamental tensions: while the intervention promised democratized access through "maker" pedagogies, participants often lacked prerequisite literacies—mouse operation, file management, typing. The space's integration into the NGO's tutoring program illuminated which affordances mattered within local socio-economic priorities and what practical work enables technological appropriation.

I argue that affordances are unevenly infrastructured: they presuppose chains of prior affordances that are unequally distributed—skills, bodily competencies, epistemic frameworks, material resources. This infrastructural stratification becomes analytically visible where "the digital" has not yet naturalized as a distinct sphere. Participatory methodologies, despite reflexive intentions, risk obscuring these conditions by treating learning as individual agency rather than collective infrastructural achievement.

By focussing on what affordances presuppose rather than what they promise, this paper contributes to debates on digital mediation in polarizing contexts, showing how well-intentioned interventions may inadvertently uphold asymmetries they seek to overcome.