Re: Institution mediated mind
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:02:58 -0700 (PDT)
While I am delighted by the turn of the discussion to
institution-mediated mind which provides a wedge for considering serious
issues about people's social commitments, identities and participations
(the issues of social psychology and sociology), the examples in the
first two exchanges (student disciplinary monitors, assembly line work,
etc) reverberate with cruelty, alienation, repression and other
misfortunes which life and individualist ideology has led most of us to
associate with institutions and organizations.
However, one of the
virtues of socio-cultural psychology ought to be able to help us
indentify, describe, and promote positive group participations and help
us develop our social beings. So maybe we ought to consider some other
examples on the other extreme, like string quartets who not only form a
closely bonded units in the activity of mutually producing a coordinated
music, but do so from standard scores composed by others, after long
periods of regular and regularized practice, dependent on rigorous
training over many years within highly specialized and regularized
practices of instrumental performance. This is without considering the
organization and economics of music publication, promotion, and
production.
Sure there are more assembly lines than string quartets, and even
more traffic jams than working assembly lines (having just returned from
two of the traffic jam capitals of the world-- Manila and Bangkok--I am
only too aware of this). And more repression and oppression than any of
them--because repression and oppression are rampant in places that don't
yet have assembly lines or traffic jams (we also got to see Myanmar this
trip). But unless we start paying more attention to how we can
coordinate, participate, and affiliate more successfully with each other,
we won't be making much music together, whether string or gamelon.
We in the MCA world tend to have all positive associations with
tool-mediated activities and tool-mediated minds, although every once in
a while someone on the list reminds us of less fortunate associations, such as
the cognitive and activity worlds of the AK-47. While I suspect
institution-mediated mind may have been conceived as a positive analogy
with tool mediation, we might want to make sure through at least some of
our examples, that we maintain some of these associations of
institutioons and organizations being extensions of our human
possibility rather than constrictions, constraints, or sufferings.
Chuck Bazerman