Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' introduction
- 1 Activity Theory Between Historical Engagement and Future-Making Practice
- PART ONE UNITS OF ANALYSIS
- PART TWO MEDIATION AND DISCOURSE
- 5 Mediation as a Means of Collective Activity
- 6 Digital Technology and Mediation: A Challenge to Activity Theory
- 7 Contextualizing Social Dilemmas in Institutional Practices: Negotiating Objects of Activity in Labor Market Organizations
- PART THREE EXPANSIVE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
- PART FOUR SUBJECTIVITY, AGENCY, AND COMMUNITY
- PART FIVE INTERVENTIONS
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
6 - Digital Technology and Mediation: A Challenge to Activity Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' introduction
- 1 Activity Theory Between Historical Engagement and Future-Making Practice
- PART ONE UNITS OF ANALYSIS
- PART TWO MEDIATION AND DISCOURSE
- 5 Mediation as a Means of Collective Activity
- 6 Digital Technology and Mediation: A Challenge to Activity Theory
- 7 Contextualizing Social Dilemmas in Institutional Practices: Negotiating Objects of Activity in Labor Market Organizations
- PART THREE EXPANSIVE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
- PART FOUR SUBJECTIVITY, AGENCY, AND COMMUNITY
- PART FIVE INTERVENTIONS
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
No societal development within the past 50 years or so has been more fierce or far-reaching than that related to information and telecommunication technology. The digital technology on which it is based has penetrated every societal process and every societal activity system. It not only laid the foundations of the World Wide Web, including its derivations, but built a new global network of communication systems.
No matter how we may judge the consequences of this technical development, we cannot but concede that digital technology has entered most things in everyday life, and it increasingly determines the activity of people even if they avoid using it. In more general terms, it has become the basis of an emerging globalization process that is not only economic but cultural, not only universal but irreversible. There is nothing outside it. Reality itself has changed fundamentally.
Amazingly, most of the scholars committed to either cultural-historical psychology or activity theory do not deal with digitalization. Or at least they underestimate its revolutionary quality and so fail to prove their concepts and methodology. Clearly, when Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria built the foundations of their approach, computers did not exist, and digitalization was not at stake. But does this fact justify the contemporary reserve? I am convinced that digitalization marks a twofold – methodological and theoretical – problem for activity theory, possibly the most difficult challenge it has been confronted with.
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- Information
- Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory , pp. 88 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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