As a novice trying to move in from the periphery of participation in this
chat session, I have developed the following construction of various ideas
concerning settings and architecture from a sociohistorical perspective. I
have pulled out the quotes from Nespor, Lemke and Ueno that jumped off the
computer screen to me and shouted "meaning!", and then attempted to
summarize them in layperson's terms that are more easily comprehensible to
me. I wanted to share this effort with the group since I feel that often the
discussion of the experts in this session exists on a different level from
the rest of our discussion and I don't sense that there's any conscious
effort to integrate different points of view and different levels of
expertise and language. Here are my efforts, and then I offer a couple thoughts:
1. " And it gets us closer to the complexity
>of the intertwined histories of (a) activities in spaces, which
>co-constitute them as places, and (b) activities that make and change
>spaces, under the guise of _their_ places. As Yrjo notes, activities (a)
>and (b) certainly overlap, and both contribute to longer-term eco-social
>processes whose trajectories give the historical dimension.
>
I wonder if in treating
the grocery store as an "objective" space and focusing on how people within
it use and make it meaningful, we are not adopting the standpoint of the
corporation; defining activity in terms of the frame imposed by the
corporation (not necessarily, I suppose -- de Certeau, who works the
space/place distinction in a similar fashion, emphasizes the potential for
people to creatively subvert and resist the corporate strategies of space
in transitory, tactical ways"
Jan Nespor:
My summation: "We need to acknowledge different users have different roles
and levels of power in developing spaces,institutional, commercial,
educational."
2. "The issue I would like to show is not only how "macro unit
of analysis" such as arena and activity becomes visible but
by whom.
In this way, visibilities of situation are multiply organized
and, so, possible actions in a situation or as part of situation
are mutliply organized as well."
Naoki Ueno:
My summation: "Different users have different views of the situation, the
space, and its materials, and sometimes these views are invisible to each
other and made visible only through certain activity structures associated
with particular users and their roles."
3. "My own approach here is precisely a blend of ecological dynamics with the
Latourian network model, with its emphasis on material-artifactual linkage
among different activities and practices, semiotically crossing over
different scales. It is the latter property which means that one cannot fix
the boundaries of even the material space, much less the place. The place
as a meaningful-place and a place-where-meanings-are-made is always partly
meaningful through its relations to other places and other spaces. Every
material affordance, whether object or spatial relationship, is a potential
link to other activities and other settings."
JAY L. LEMKE:
My summation: "There's a material view of space and settings, and a semiotic
view -- where the meaning of that space or setting is established relative
to the meanings established for other spaces or settings. These two views
interact and are in flux as the material world around us is reshaped."
My comments:
I think I have felt very much akin to Jean Lave as I have read these
discussions in this sense: Whenever people are defining a space, they are
doing so through years of experiencing what it means to be a social
participant in that space. They have been apprentices and they have learned
the rules of conduct for those spaces and for their particular roles in that
space. Similarly, when architects and industrial designers look at space,
they too have been trained to think about these spaces in a particular way.
I attended art school in my younger years, and I also come from a family
with some history in design of material objects. Designers take it for
granted that someone designed objects and that space has meanings both
institutional and personal. They have been trained and socialized to see
their environments this way.
Also, my background as a newspaper reporter showed me that architectural
design -- particularly of the exterior of a building -- is always a deeply
socially negotiated issue. This negotiation extends beyond the simple fact
of construction. Once users participate in these newly built spaces, they
realize how the space "malfunctions." They adapt or fix it. Some of the most
raging public debates I've covered related to the exterior design, size and
layout of buildings in relation to other buildings and building uses.
So, this said, my question as a novice sociohistorist is this: How should I
view this online discussion of sociohistorists? At first blush, it seems
that I'm observing people trying to articulate a perspective for the first
time that designers and newspaper reporters use in their practices everyday.
In journalism parlance, there's no news here. But maybe I'm missing
something about this particular culture. It does seem that there's an
attempt to determine the theoretical mechanisms underlying how people define
and use materials/space for social purposes in history -- as if the
sociohistorists are trying to see which theory (Latour's for example) might
"fit" to describe the material/space connections involving history and
everyday use. In other words, this community of practice -- the xmca chat
list -- is establishing its own "use" and "practice" for material/space
connections.
As a novice educational technology researcher, I think this discussion is
helpful in that it underscores the importance of defining space when you're
designing an instructional method, and further, that there are different
ways of construeing "space" -- ie., virtual space on the computer. Also, the
discussion shows how a text-based culture of scholars needs to find its own
vocabulary to understand these space/material issues, and that's what I'm
observing in action...that struggle to understand these phenomena in this way.
All for now,
Louise Yarnall