The term “affordance” has been used in sociology earlier than in Wellman’s text. For example, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, in 1992, have defined the concept in their ” Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies”. Latour himself describes, as the source of the concept, the works of James Gibson, a psychologist who in 1977 used the term in an article title “The Theory of Affordance”. Barry Wellman might have imported the term into what is sometimes called “sociology of the internet” – though it has been previously used as well in HCI studies, which are a related field.