Silent participation

nate (schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu)
Wed, 8 Sep 1999 19:12:02 -0500

Contact, Community and Multilogue
http://cite.ped.gu.se/Eklanda/Papers/ISCRAT/CoCoMu.html

I would first like to thank Eva for a very interesting "perspective" on the
activity systems we engage in. The notion of the object of a particular
activity system becoming a tool in the next was very interesting. What
stood out the strongest for me was the discussion on silent participation.

In two of the activity systems "Community building" and "multilougueing"
silence of participants was seen in contradiction to the activity systems.

In describing the "community building" activity system Eva argued,

" The silent participant obviously does not contribute to community
building, and so might threaten the trust of the community"?

Later in describing the "multilougueing" activity system it was argued,

"Silent participation is rather a condition for the smooth functioning of
the system -- always there as a potential resource but also alway not
competing for the bandwidth. Nevertheless, for analytical purposes it seems
most reasonable to regard subjects who participate in the multilougue read
only as external to the multilogical activity system, as they rather
participate in the fashion of subscribers to a newsletter, i.e. in the mode
of participation belonging to the activity system of academic networking".

And later within the same section,

...."They are acting as community members of the electronic network but not
of an emerging multilougue"

This of course in no way does justice to the contradictions of silent
participation within the activity systems, but hopefully provides some
context to how silent participation was situated.

First, with the community building activity system, I wonder if silent
participation does actually contribute to community building. It seems
that silence can be an active not only passive form of participation.
Making the active choice of silence can allow other thread (multilougues)
to emerge. It would also seem that silence (active or passive) contributes
to certain forms of "community of practice" over others. In this sense
both multilougueing and silence contributes (or does not contribute) to
community building.

Second, in the multilougue activity system, I could understand for
analytical purposes not seeing them as part of the activity of an emerging
multilougue because all that could reasonably be studied was
externalization; transformation, participation, and engagement seen only as
the observable. For me, this is not a critique as such, but a questioning
of how we can account for the internalization side of transformation. At
times, being silent, just as Eva described is one being a member of the
network and not the multilougue, but then there are times where silence is
very transformative even if its not externalized on a particular thread.
Maybe this goes back to Vygotsky's differentiation between a collection vs
social psychology.

For me, this goes beyond Eva's argument of silent participation and is
situated in how an activity approach can deal with internalization or the
dialectic that occurs within - not only outside the head.
Nate

Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/
schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu

People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds,
People who possess strong feelings even people with great minds
and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls
L.S. Vygotsky