However, a deeper issue is raised by Bill and Jay when one draws in the
choice of sharing or not sharing one's own individually realized
externaliztion with others. This is of course the decision whether or
not to ENTER INTO Joint activity in a public and collectively
referenctial ZPD. Jay Lemke and others have pointed out consistently that
it is inadequate to leave the analysis at the individual (or even social
level) but that one must also draw in societal (cultural-historical)
analysis by dealing with the development of motives, affiliations, and
ideology within differnt cultures and between different segments of the
same culture.
That is, within the grand skeme of things, "me and my computer" is only a
neccessary but not sufficient unit of analysis to take because (as
we all know) social cooperation aimed at the accomplishment of shared
goals (in the classroom, workplace, etc.) can take place without the
identical societal appropriation taking place in each of the participants.
Societal approapriation (a selective dialectic between both
internal/externalization AND non-extern/internalization) emerges out of
social cooperation (joint actions) by way of participation in the active
building of personal/historical meanings,
deffidence/resistance to formal apprenticeships, and
acceptance or denial of standard cultural indoctrination practices in the
societal ZPD.
Well, those are the terms I would use. Maybe try applying them to your own
examples and see if they fit.
Paul F. Ballantyne
Dept. of Psychology
York University
4700 Keele Street
North York, Ontario
CANADA M3J 1P3
e-mail: pballan who-is-at yorku.ca