The Affordances of Technology

from Mr. Secrets: Composing Identity Through Hyperlocal Narratives
by Tony O'Keefe -from the book: The New World of Composing



The Affordances of Technology

             In the chapter called Mr. Secrets, Tony O’Keefe outlines his plunge into the world of multimodal composition, in which he uses recent revelations about his father as the story focus of his project. While putting the multimodal project together, he realizes that working with digital tools gave him a flexibility, or as he puts it, “affordances,” that he could use to tell and enhance the story he was trying to tell about his father and Millie.

            Multimodal composition consists of a mixture of audio, video, and other media materials to create meaning. The tools used in making this kind composition can also be used to help give disparate meaning to multimodal elements. For example, O’Keefe uses his father’s own musical performances to accompany the visual element of Millie’s handwritten letters, giving his dead father a connection within the project that did not exist otherwise.  Using these kind of affordances meant he could take items like music, photos, and letters and use them to create new possibilities in the telling his father’s story.

The use of imagination and the items at hand, can be used to suggest multiple connections that do not exist. Sometimes the story needs more, and technology allows an additional avenue of affordance to create connections from the materials and things we do have. O’Keefe uses the voice-over of his wife to give life to “Millie,” whose real voice only exists on the printed page of her letters, and he makes use of disparate photographs to create visual meaning to the story of Millie and his father. He even includes his own handwritten production notes in the making of his project, finding a way of connecting himself to the story, while serving the multimodal aspects of the project.  

-Bradley Civick