=2E.. the idea of cascading activity systems IS very interesting --
At 19.12 -0500 99-09-08, nate wrote:
>The notion of the object of a particular
>activity system becoming a tool in the next was very interesting.
-- I found it with Reijo Miettinen (his article still on the MCA Website,
and now also in the MCA, I think), at exactly the right moment, when I was
trying to get a grasp on the xlists as an ecosocial activity system, and it
was useful for me to go through it in this fashion.
However, I'm not sure if the separation into three activity systems is
warranted. The mailinglist as a whole must certainly be considered as an
activity system -- if there hadn't been systemic coherence in the Xlist
activities they would not have lasted so long, and with a recognizable
culture. And what I wished to explore with analyzing the activity as three
cascading systems was the relations between what I see as the overarching
motive to jointly develop central issues in CHAT, and the necessary
preconditions for doing so in the distributed fashion of a mailinglist,
which do not pre-exist the multilogical activity but ALSO have to be
produced and produced again over the same channel. In the case of channel
maintenance we have seen several times during the past year how
multilogical activity is through and through dependent on people and things
(gremlins) not necessarily involved in developing central issues of CHAT.
And in the case of the CHAT community, the Xlists are quite obviously just
a part of the networks where newcomers are apprenticed and all CHAT
practicioners produce and exchange their goods. So my analysis is from a
perspective where Xlist multilogue -- generative semiosis on CHAT issues --
is in the center of my picture from the beginning.
Mike Cole and many others on the Xlists have been very persistent in
exploring ways of making THIS activity system generative, both in terms of
introducing organized activies, and in terms of facilitating the
spontaneous emergence of focussed multilogue. What has motivated my papers
is my puzzlement with the oscillations between phases of excitement and
focussing and phases of dissolution and disappointment -- features of
mailinglist activity observed by Mike long before I arrived in the virtual
setting. I quote him in my second paper:
"A number of folk have commented, myself included, that in those periods
when the discussion gets hot, as it has at least once in each of the
subconferences over the last year, one begins to get a sense that a sort of
Vygotskian "chaining" or "thinking in complexes" takes place. At first the
conceptual flow is exciting, but at some point, one longs to lay out the
messages side by side and get close to a simultaneous/paradigmatic summary
of the flow, e.g., to create a product that might
approximate what LSV calls true concepts."
(M.C. 89-04-04)
"...there is a heterogeneous but constrained set of topics which comes up
once or twice a year such that in some cases (zone of proximal development,
context, learning/development/play, Vygotsky vs Piaget, genetic
methodologies, activity centered instruction, etc.) have reappeared over a
number of years. By itself this is no problem. The discussions are always
interesting. But I get the nagging sense that it should be possible for the
discussions of these key conceptions in
socio-cultural-historical-activity-centered theories to CUMULATE."
(M.C. 92-10-01)
-- and, after writing myself through a couple of rounds with these
intriguing and contradictory phenomena it was just about time to return my
products to their Object so that it can object (as Latour would say):
perhaps we ARE collectively able to "approximate true concepts"?
Eva