Today, interest-driven interactions increasingly take place online as people join social media groups or ‘affinity spaces’ dedicated to specific interests. As defined by Gee (2004), ‘affinity spaces’ are loosely organized places (online or offline) built around shared passions, goals, and practices, rather than shared demographic characteristics. Newcomers and experts alike participate in the same space and learn from each other, and there are many ways of participating and gaining status. Different forms of knowledge are valued and encouraged, including intensive knowledge about a specialist topic and extensive knowledge about a variety of subjects. Consequently, affinity spaces may be suited for those with a monotropic processing style.
For example, while many social interventions aim at teaching communication ‘rules’ or social skills, autistic youth may benefit more substantially from participation in affinity spaces where they can connect with others based on mutual interests and communicate in natural, yet structured, settings. This is encapsulated by the words of ‘Ben’: ‘I am sick of social skills groups … Why can’t someone go to the bar with me or to chess club? That’s what I need’ (quoted in Bagatell 2007: 45). Following Koteyko et al. (2023), discourse research could be applied in the creation of resources for designing more inclusive affinity spaces so that everyone’s contributions are welcomed and accommodated. As Ito et al. (2018) outline, affinity spaces can foster ‘connected learning’ opportunities, that is the connection of personal interests to academic, civic, and career-related opportunities. Through the support of affinity spaces, autistic individuals may gain confidence and learn practical, transferable skills such as creative writing or programming. Thus, facilitating participation in such spaces would not only assist with social and communication opportunities but could also help to improve educational and employment outcomes for autistic people (see Department for Work and Pensions 2023).
So I need a name for the spaces through which people with a shared interest or passion can move back and forth to develop into and be a certain kind of person, such as a gamer, a Catholic, or a physicist. I will call such spaces affinity spaces (Gee, 2004, 2007, 2015a; Gee & Hayes, 2010, 2011).
Spaces like the annual GDC, E3 (the game industry’s major trade show), LAN parties (where people network their computers together in one place to play games together), multiplayer game play from home with others around the world via the Internet, gaming shows on Twitch TV, and game sites of all sorts are affinity spaces in the gaming world. I call them affinity spaces because such spaces invite an affiliation with gamers and gaming and people can come to them to experience a shared interest in gaming (at the level of either interest or passion).
Even my game room at home is a gamer affinity space. When people visit my game room, they enter a gamer space. Not many people come, but if someone new comes he or she will see and feel an affinity for gaming and gamers and have access to sharing in or learning about that affinity.
So, like physical space, affinity spaces are nested inside one another, are connected to one another, and exist at different levels from small to large. They can be mapped out and their parts can be named. They are the multiple spaces that allow for the looping journeys that constitute and sustain development. Affinity spaces constitute the geography of development.
Narrow specializations in narrow academic silos have brought us a great deal of progress in science. But times are changing. When we face highly complex problems, narrow expertise can become dangerous. Narrow experts tend to underestimate and undervalue what they don’t know (Harford, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; Weinberger, 2012). They tend to think that their methods answer complex questions that, in reality, go well beyond their area of expertise. And they tend to engage in “groupthink” as they converge in their narrow echo chambers, advancing paradigms that are not tested against the results of other silos.
We are all aware that, thanks to digital technologies, opportunities for learning have become ubiquitous outside school. What fewer people realize is that teaching has also become ubiquitous outside school. Some people are using the Internet and other electronic means to become uncredentialed experts (and not just self-proclaimed experts, but fraudulent ones, of which there are many too, of course) (Anderson, 2012; Hitt, 2013). They work together to produce knowledge, citizen science, media, products, and inventions that rival what credentialed experts can do, certainly what they can do alone. But they also organize themselves into what I call affinity spaces, places where teaching of all different sorts goes on (Gee, 2013; Gee & Hayes, 2010).
Throughout this book, I will point out that today people often organize into spaces where they bond over a shared affinity (for these people, AA), and not big categories such as race, class, gender, or ability (Gee, 2013). The people in the restaurant were of different ages, but they were “peers” in just the way all the different sorts of people devoted to anime fan fiction, say, are peers, regardless of age or other classificatory differences. Despite my academic “knowledge”—and even despite having once read about AA as a sort of affinity space (Holland et al., 1998)—I brought my memories of families rather than my academic knowledge to bear.
Some of the spaces in the larger Catholic affinity space were special. They were what I will call home bases. Home bases are key places where fellow travelers come together a good deal to engage in the activities that keep their shared affinity alive. They are places where the people with the most passion for the shared affinity are the key organizers, motivators, teachers, and standard-setters for the affinity space as a whole. For us, there were three home bases: home, school, and the parish church.
As we saw in the preceding chapter, affinity spaces existed in the past, long before digital media. What is new today is that there are a great many more affinity spaces and they have a lot more virtual spaces in them.
Affinity spaces are becoming the prime places where people engage in 21st-century teaching, learning, doing, and being. As a result, we have to begin thinking of space as a physical and virtual meld.
Affinity spaces are primarily defined by an affinity for solving certain sorts of problems. As such, they always involve the development of specific sorts of skills.
Today, many young people get important skills from their travels in affinity spaces. As one example, consider a 15-year-old girl named Alex (Gee & Hayes, 2010). Alex, who we met earlier, has a large following as a fan fiction writer. She uses The Sims to create graphic vampire romance stories (images with text). Alex has to make her own images (using tools that can modify images from the game and other tools from outside the game), write and edit (with help from fans) her own texts, and maintain a web presence to keep contact with her thousands of readers. TSR Workshop is one of her home bases, and her own website is a home base for an affinity space organized around her that her devoted fans occupy.
We can imagine that there will be—that there should be, at least—a new type of “architect,” what I will call an “affinity space architect.” An affinity apace architect would be an architect of interest and passion in melded physical and digital spaces in the service of building new types of schools and other teaching and learning spaces. They would be designers and builders of affinity spaces.
Such an architect will consider, based on a given passion as an attractor, all the physical and digital spaces currently available in the world today and the new ones we need to design and build to supplement them, so that we can engage the sorts of teaching, learning, and development we need to make the world a better place. An affinity space architect’s goal would be to transform interest and passion in the name of participation, interaction, making, and teaching and learning, for better, more equitable, smarter, more moral, and resilient people, groups, and societies.
If we cannot hold space for our own complexity, if we cannot process even the existence of these intrapersonal dialectics, then we also cannot hold that space for the complexity of others and instead default back to this sort of knee jerk reaction, this binary understanding of right and wrong.
UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics – YouTube
Affinity Group
Through free association, people will find those of mutual interests in every sphere of life to form groups on the basis of their affinity. But whether these various groups meet and coordinate their activity in workshops, gardens, or other spaces of encounter and whether they are invested in maintaining energy systems, growing food forests, or building homes, such a society cannot last without mutual responsibility.
The most beautiful and horrifying thing about the Internet we know and love is its capacity for specificity.
There is no niche too small, no ideology too fringe, and no distance too great for affinity groups to coagulate and grow.
Where you were once a lone weirdo, you now have access to a community of several other weirdos…if you know where to find them.
UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics – YouTube
Affinity Group: “the group of people associated with a given semiotic domain”
Semiotic Domains = Affinity Group + Situated Meaning
