Updated hypertext document online: http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/iscrat_99.html
Paper presented to Fourth Congress of the
International Society for Cultural Research
and Activity Theory
Aarhus, Denmark: June 7-11, 1998
by Martin Ryder
Consciousness is not found in the brain, but in everyday practice. This is the hypothesis that formed the basis of Vygotsky's work. Consciousness is manifested in our labor, in the communities that are forged by what we do, in the tools we use, and in our language: the products of yesterday's understandings appropriated for today's problems. This paper traces a dialectical process of tool design, social practice, and tool use on the World Wide Web. The proliferation of information technology is leading to the creation of entirely new sets of spatial, cultural, and social relations (see, for example, Landow, 1992; Rheingold, 1993; Mitchell, 1995; Negroponte, 1995; Dyson, 1997). Virtual communities have emerged from a surprising intersection of humanity and technology offering new understandings from mediating relationships characterized by openness, plurality, and co-emergence - the central themes of contemporary literary theory, user-centered design, and constructivist educational philosophy.
Much like the printing press revolutionized the pre-modern world, the World Wide Web poses revolutionary implications to the present order. The Web is a mass medium. But unlike other mass media such as television, radio, film, and print publishing, this medium appears to be open to mass producers as well as mass consumers. For the first time since mythical Theuth invented the written word, we have a medium which allows other voices to engage with an author in discourse; a medium which has no center podium and offers no privileged position for any message; a medium which allows teacher and learner to share a common space in which there is no established authority, but uses widely distributed knowledge resources to forge new levels of consciousness; a medium which fosters creation of learning communities supporting active collaboration among anonymous peers, freely sharing artifacts that emerge out of this activity. These are the possibilities that distinguish the Web from all other mass media.
Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is not a universal affordance. At this writing Internet access remains out of reach for 95% of the world's people. But Moore's Law remains in effect, and as the cost of the technology continues to fall, the infrastructure for world-wide, people-to-people exchange continues to expand. The Web is a phenomenon of the 1990s. The World Wide Web grew from a base several thousand pages in 1994 to more than 120 million pages four years later (Sullivan, 1998). Indications suggest that technical, economic and cultural barriers will continue to erode in a dialectical fashion as people continue to appropriate the tools of networking as instruments of participation in social practice.
A page is an electronic artifact that is accessible from a Web browser on a personal computer. A page may be a document, an interactive form, an executable program, or some other tool available to anonymous users anywhere in the world. Anyone with interactive access to the Internet can "publish" a page. Some pages are generated by computers, but most are the outcome of direct human labor. It is fair to say that the majority of pages have no measurable value to most people. Few, if any pages are useful to everyone. But seen as a human artifact, each page has some measurable value to someone at some point in time.
The term value is ambiguous. We can speak of exchange value or use value, and the two are not directly related. Exchange value is generally expressed in objective terms: One dollar will buy three potatoes. Six hours of Hans's labor will cost 450DKK. But use value does not lend itself to objective measure. Use values become reality only by use or consumption (Marx, 1867). Since Web pages are freely accessible, they have virtually no exchange value. The pragmatic, utilitarian value of an online artifact is revealed with each use. That value depends upon the intention of the user and the resulting outcome. In other words, the value of an artifact is determined within the context of practical activity. An artifact without activity is meaningless. There are no aesthetic or extrinsic functional criteria. To establish the value of a tool, we must observe how it mediates human intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the activity (Bannon and Bødker, 1991) .
One useful perspective for understanding artifacts in use is Activity Theory. This approach has become a well-established framework for the analysis of context-dependent, dynamic problems which involve the use of tools (Hasan, 1996). Activity theory is a useful tool for analyzing revolutionary phenomena, an instrument which enables us to observe transformation in human practice.
Engeström (1987) offers a model of an activity system which identifies the major relevant elements for analysis. An activity is undertaken by a human agent (subject) who is motivated toward the solution of a problem or purpose (object), and mediated by tools (artifacts) in collaboration with others (community). The structure of the activity is constrained by cultural factors including conventions (rules) and social strata (division of labor) within the context.
Using such a model, we can assess the roles between the various elements of the system. There are three possible paradigms which define the relationship between the subject, artifact, and object. Each is defined from the standpoint of a relationship between the mediating instrument and sentient human beings.
The ideal paradigm is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan (1964). When we think of a tool in the ideal sense, we think of it as an instrument of agency. It is wielded by a conscious subject who has a clear intention toward the object. When the tool user is the agent in the activity, the design or selection of the tool is directly connected to its use (Newman and Holzman, 1993). In this ideal paradigm, the human subject directs the activity and the tool is an extension of the person, amplifying her potency toward the object of her intention.
The second paradigm is a bit more cynical. Where humans are passive in activity systems, the analysis of tool becomes less enabling and more controlling. Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) describes how technology can become an instrument of domination over the human spirit. Marcuse pictures a society, marked by passive consumerism, the logical consequence of advanced industrialization. Mass production begets mass consumption. Life becomes easier because our world is already constructed for us. The highways are already paved, the books already written. Words mean only what authorities say they mean. Free agency is reduced to freedom of choice: which brand of ketchup? which television channel? which wedding dress? which floor plan? which political candidate? Click here!
A learner's engagement with media can be evaluated between these two paradigms. Zucchermaglio (1993) describes a full technology, a system rich with information but which allows for minimal user input; and an empty technology, a blank slate ready to receive the actor's full creative expressions. A rich and structured media environment offers little agency to the learner. It places the user in a passive mode. Full technologies may serve a functional purpose, but active learning is not the intent. In contrast, tools which the learner crafts out of empty technologies are defined within situated contexts of practical activity. The specific problem at hand specifies the tool. The tool, the user and the outcome are connected.
There is a third paradigm for activity in which the human participant is neither subject nor object, but the medium or instrument. Working people know this model. The activity in which they are engaged is not of their own design, but that of an employer. Marx (1844) recognized an alienating quality in this relationship since motivation stems not from intrinsic desire but extrinsic compensation. To the extent that the laborer is a mere cog in a larger machine, the effects of alienation become more pronounced. The laborer's actions are not of his own direction, but in response to command and control. The agent in the activity is disconnected from the action while the laboring medium is disconnected from the motivating purpose. This alienation can be seen in commercial sites on the Web. The artifact is not identified with its creator but with its corporate or institutional owner.
Apart from alienated labor, human mediation in activity can be highly personal and intimate. When humans interact with one another they offer themselves as a mirror for the other: affirming self validation and reflecting differences. In this context, the agent can be both subject and object, while a collaborator serves a mediating role. We see ourselves through the eyes of others. Mirroring is the significant role of a parent, both to correct and to affirm the child's self understanding. The path from child to object and from object to child must pass through another person (Vygotsky, 1978 p. 30). In this respect, the most fundamental educational medium is another human being with whom the learner interacts and constructs meaning. As the child grows to maturity the parenting role shifts to others in the community. In the professional context, the practitioner community serves that role. This mediating function explains the parallel relationship which Engestrom has assigned between tool and community.
An activity system is by definition a socio-cultural system since it involves the use of culturally constituted artifacts. Whether the subject acts alone or in collaboration with peers, the use of tools enlists the historic involvement of other people engaged in prior activities. Whether a clay pot, a microprocessor, or a Web page, an artifact is the material embodiment of dead, congealed labor (Currey, 1997). Central to Vygotsky´s work was an approach that denied the strict separation of the individual and the social. The individual and the cultural were conceived as mutually constitutive elements of a single, interacting system. The appropriation of historic labor supplants labor in the present context and unites the present with the past in order to command some future outcome. This defines the dialectic nature of activity. Artifacts do not merely facilitate mental processes that would otherwise exist. Instead, they fundamentally shape and transform them (Cole & Wertsch, 1996). Mind is not located entirely inside the head. Tools shape the consciousness of those who wield them. They establish the fundamental modes of activity involving productive labor. The tools themselves were conceived by conscious agents engaged in practical activity. The tool molds the wielder who molds the tool, ad infinitum. We see a self-and-species-transformation through the use of tools (Newman and Holzman, 1993).
The proliferation of Web-based artifacts in the recent past has provided a rich laboratory for observing the evolution of tools in a networked culture. As I have engaged in the phenomenological study of my own activities on the Web, I have recognized patterns of development which parallel the activities of many other academics who make use of the Web. My own activities began in 1993 with a simple list of online artifacts, the work of other researchers who have written on topics of interest to me. I watched my "page" evolve from the beginnings of a crude, unsorted list of so-called bookmarks to multiple indexes of domain knowledge. The activity that spawned this work was common academic research. My initial list resided on a gopher server. It included links to scholarly papers, professional societies and other gopher sites of like minded individuals. I was not alone in this activity. It was a practice spontaneously embraced by scholars, practitioners, and hobbyists around the world in an attempt to mediate the amorphous web of Internet resources into some coherent structure.
The process of mediation is a generative process which necessarily involves productive labor (Wittrock, 1974, Jonassen, 1994, Furey, 1997). The subject (i.e. the learner) relates new information to prior knowledge in the construction of meaning and understanding. The outcome of this activity is some form of artifact. Generative learning actively constructs its own interpretations of information and draws inferences from them. An effective learning technology would allow for expressions which connect new ideas to existing knowledge structures. The distinguishing quality of the Web is open hypertext, a technology which can glue disparate components together into a coherent structure. Using the Web, the subject can appropriate numerous artifacts and electronic tools, crafting them into a structure that is an outgrowth of one's own consciousness.
Vygotsky viewed cognitive development as the gradual reorganization of consciousness. He embraced Marx's dialectical analysis that by acting on the external world and changing it, the actor changes his own nature. (Avineri, 1968, p.81). In the process, the consciousness of the actor undergoes constant reorganization. Rumelhart (1980) describes it as a threefold process of accretion, tuning, then restructuring. This process is easily identified in the outward manifestations of serious Web pages where learners represent their own cognitive development, making it available to others in the sense of a virtual zone of proximal development..
When the first graphics-capable Web browser was released in 1994, the World Wide Web exploded with activity. This event spawned hundreds of new Web sites like my own. Other researchers began to involve themselves in the practice of online publishing. The list I was maintaining was dramatically enriched as virtual collaborators asserted their presence on the World Wide Web. As my own page grew, it transformed, taking on a sense of structure and purpose. The crude list of hypertext links began to evolve into a logical structure with annotation and the attribution of authorship. The index evolved into a topical outline. The outline developed into detailed representations of domain knowledge which included obscure as well as the established and salient aspects of the field. Eventually the contents surpassed the structure's ability to contain them. Within a year, my simple index was at the edge of chaos. It was necessary to subdivide the unmanageable monolith into separate, well-ordered documents, each with its own unique structure and purpose, each unconstrained by the requirements of the others. One page became fifty. The pages which remained useful to me enjoyed continued care and feeding. The others died of atrophy.
The pages themselves were not the major focus of my activities. They were created and maintained in the context of academic research. The initial list was the basis of research for an academic paper which was to be my personal introduction to the Internet. A semiotics index followed in 1995 when I was engaged in preparation of a paper for an academic conference. With each paper I wrote, I made use of online academic sources. The labor involved to collect those resources was saved in the form of topical lists. The lists were edited, and made available to anyone engaged in similar research. I have continued this practice for subsequent papers, including this one. The practice of doing research in the open has been rewarding for its ability to place me in the midst of communities with whom I have never made prior contact. To the extent that it serves my interest to connect with these communities, I continue to maintain the artifacts that were created in the activity of research.
Documents, indexes and lists are more than delivery mechanisms to represent knowledge. They are powerful resources for constructing and negotiating social space (Brown and Duguid, 1997). Brown and Duguid suggest that a document can seed a community. From scholars, to hobbyists, to practitioner communities, to political underground movements, the placement of a marker in cyberspace is an effective method of establishing contact with like-minded people. By linking our own documents to anchors of other documents, we identify ourselves within a community. By publishing artifacts of our own making, we offer anchors for others to appropriate (or not) in the formation of their own identity.
Identity is rhetoric's ultimate strategy ( Burke, 1950). In The Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke describes his conception of the social function and the central role of identity. Identification locates persuasion within a context of mutual inquiry and knowledge creation (Burke, 1966 p.46). We identify ourselves in reference to other people, their interests, their desires, their values and fascinations. Using semiotic strategies, we reveal these shared aspirations with our intended community. Burke coined the term consubstantial to suggest how we connect with a community through the use of these common assets. We express our identity in the clothes we wear, in the words we use, and the experiences we share. In scholarly writing, our identities are revealed in our cited references. The rhetoric of the Web is revealed in our bookmarks and hypertext connections. We use these to connect ourselves to a community and to attract others with similar motivations. On the Web, just as in oratory and writing, we reference our own identity to the sign systems and iconic landmarks of the community: celebrities, revered ideas and concepts, organizations and well-known artifacts. We do this to attract others of like mind and kindred spirit. And when other people make connections to our work, it pleases us as a sign of community acceptance - the mirroring function we so desperately require from infancy through adulthood. These are the threads which weave the fabric of community.
A Web server's referer log1 makes it possible for an author to discover the sites which refer others to her own work. By following these linkages, the author can explore the common aspirations that form the basis of her community. I use this approach as a means of staying current with the various communities that acknowledge my own interests. I also make these sites known to each other and to patrons outside of the community, allowing them to form connections on the basis of their common interest2. Creating a Web page around a concept or professional practice is a labor-intensive process of mediation. Maintaining the site over time is equally taxing. But once a community has formed around the artifact, the process of mediation transforms from a single-handed effort to a community function. The labor involved in updating the artifact can be shifted from the originator to the community. What formerly required one person's diligent and frequent searches for new and relevant information now requires infrequent visits to sites within the community spawned by the original document. These occasional visits invariably reward my own motivating interests. Consistently I find new artifacts to appropriate for inclusion in my own document, increasing its potential to attract new patrons to this self-defined community. In effect, the Web and its artifacts evolve in an autopoietic fashion as a reflection of community activity. It is at once the object and the instrument of activity.
I suggest that this is consistent with the Vygotskian view of social consciousness. Consciousness is not the attribute of any particular state or process such as attention or memory, but rather the relation between subject and object, the organization of productive forces engaged in practical activity. (Lee, 1985, p.70). Consciousness develops through an organism's interaction with the world in the act of production and consumption. The essence of production is consumption, and consumption is immediately production (Marx, 1857). Whether an object is a work of art, a problem solution, a Web page, conceptual learning, or personal identity, it is realized through the twofold process of production and consumption. The production of this paper involved consumption of the thirty-some listed sources. Many of these resources were accessed and consumed by means of tools such as the Activity Theory index which was created in an earlier phase of this activity. That tool was itself produced through the consumption of related work by other learners and scholars in the field. Each prior work was the product of human intellectual labor consuming other artifacts an unending historical, dialectical cycle (see Ryder, 1995). .
The Web does not change the nature of activity systems. But it does reify the socio-historical connections between artifact and object, connections which traditionally have been ignored. Knowledge tends to be discussed as though it were an object to be created and manipulated rather than being associated with our acting and existing in a biologically and phenomenologically constituted world (Davis and Sumara, 1997). When we engage with our own agency in learning activities on the Web, we observe that it becomes a process of opening ourselves to others and opening the possibility of affecting the world as we affect our understandings of the world, watching our identities emerge as we interact with the communities which we, ourselves create.
Notes:
1
For a technical explanation of the referer log see Jeff Burchell (1996) Who's Linking to You? http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/geektalk/96/47/index4a.html See also Directive Technologies: http://www.directive.com/logfiles.htm. See also Bryan Horling: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~bhorling/cgi/oldindex.html.2
For an example of a "community" which is formed around a specific Web page, see http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/reflect/semiotics.html.Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Suzanne Sullivan for probing and testing some of the ideas presented here, and for her special assistance in locating appropriate graphics to augment the text.
Thanks to Jeanne Curran for engaging with me in dialog during the formative phase of this project.
Special thanks to Betty Goldman's sharp editorial eyes assuring that all "i"s are dotted and "t"s are crossed and that all references are properly cited.
The "passive learner" graphic comes from the Zeus Monte Carlo production facility: http://zedy00.desy.de/~funnel/
The scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times was appropriated from http://www.wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de/fbu/mitarbeiter/beschorner
The "baby" picture is from Laura L.Knabel, KINSA/KODAK Photo Contest winner: http://webs.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/specialSituations/babies/babiesMain.shtml
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