Futurelab conference transcript Opening Pandora’s Toolbox: How digital tools empower learners and teachers 6­7 November 2002 National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford Culture, communication and cognition Professor James Wertsch, Washington University James: I'm going to talk about the set of issues concerned with culture, communication and cognition. In particular I'll be continuing some of the ideas that Martin Freeth touched on when talking about the print revolution and the TV and video revolution, internet revolution. Also, specially near the end of what I have to say, we'll be talking a fair amount about a version of what Jim Norton discussed under the heading of 'Benefit or Curse', because I think that's part of a story that we really need to take into account when looking at the approach to culture, communication and cognition that I will be pursuing here this afternoon. Most of my examples will be low tech and I think the idea here will be for me to give you some examples of the kinds of ways I think about culture, communication and cognition, and for that discussion to be extended in light of the kind of expertise we have sitting in this room. So it's one of the things that makes this presentation really very unusual and exciting for me because I'm talking to a group that has a whole complementary set of knowledge and expertise in areas that I'm not really used to dealing with, as you'll probably see as we go along here. Anyway, let me start with an example that I want to use as an illustration of much of what I'll be talking about throughout the presentation here. I want to talk about what happens when I engage in certain kinds of memory activities. Namely imagine that I'm sitting in my office and somebody calls me up on the telephone and asks me, 'you know you talked to me last week, we discussed a book that you mentioned, and it's a book by, say, Smith and I just want to know what that title was because you said you knew it, and you mentioned it but I've forgotten it now'. Well when somebody catches me on the phone at that point I'm often likely to forget myself what that title was, and so what do I do? The first thing I'm likely to do is to hum and ha a bit on the phone but then that is usually followed by my looking around on my bookshelves because my books are organised by alphabetical order of author. And sometimes I'll find a book on the shelf there but oftentimes this doesn't work either because ­ this probably doesn't happen to any of you ­ but I have students who sometimes take books and never bring them back. And so what is my next option? Well oftentimes while continuing to chat on the phone, the thing that I'll do, having my computer on in front of me, is switch quickly over to Netscape if I'm out of it and go to Amazon.com and type in the name of the author and be able to recognise the title of the book immediately, and then speak authoritatively and say, 'oh what you're looking for is The Origin of Nationalities, it's Routledge 1992' or something like that. This is a very common kind of exercise, and what I'd like to do here is to raise a few questions about this kind of example. And the idea here is not to just think about how you would remember with the help of Amazon.com but how cognition and memory and other mental functions occur in today's technological environment in general. It's oftentimes misleading to describe what I've just done as saying 'I remembered'. If you came immediately after that episode and asked me, 'well who did the remembering there?' I'd say, 'well I remembered, I told her on the phone who the author was, didn't I?' I think this is a very common kind of response to this, but I think it's also very misleading. I think it's assigning credit for agency, for remembering in this case, in the wrong place, or at least only partially in the right place in what we sometimes call the copyright age. The copyright age is a term that comes from the literary analyst Northrop Fry, who wrote about how we've moved into an era where people believe that virtually anything they say or write is deserving of a copyright, we're almost obsessed ­ and perhaps this is particularly an
American obsession ­ but we're obsessed with individual creativity of the autonomous agent, as if something that I write in a paper came from nowhere except between my ears and what is on the paper belongs solely to me. Fry was arguing that actually throughout the history of literature there's virtually no one who's been a total creator of what they do ­ Shakespeare borrowed shamelessly from others, Dostoyevsky copied big sections out of newspapers and edited them a little bit into some of his stories. The point is, we tend to have this image of the copyright age, we assign agency in the creation of writing or in the case of remembering to the individual, the isolated individual or the autonomous agent as it's sometimes called. And I think this is again misleading and it doesn't help us to understand what we're talking about at a meeting like this. The reason we're tempted to talk that way, though, has to do with what we could call the invisibility or the transparency of cultural tools. The kind of image I have in mind here is that actually ­ and I'll develop this more as we go across these examples ­ actually if you said, 'well who did the remembering in that case?', if I were honest or if I weren't caught up in the copyright age ideology, I'd say, 'well you know it's really a combination of me and a very complex cultural tool here'. First of all I have a Compaq computer, there's the software, there's Netscape, there's Amazon.com, there's a whole social system that surrounds them. And so to say that I did the remembering is kind of a crazy thing, but we're tempted to do that because cultural tools in many instances are largely invisible as we look at human action or cognition. We're likely to attribute agency to the wrong locations in this view. What it also means is that with the change in cultural tool we're at least tempted to say we have a change in the notion of agency. If you take this example a step further and you say five years ago or certainly ten years ago I couldn't have looked up that book title on Amazon.com, I maybe could have done it in a very slow way with a hook up to my university library, but I couldn't have looked it up at Amazon.com so quickly. And if I'm sitting out here and have access to an internet café or now with wireless hook up, I can 'remember things' that I couldn't have remembered ten years ago because we didn't have the technology to have this cultural tool participate in the remembering process. So one of the things that happens is as cultural tools change ­ think of Amazon.com, all the software and hardware that backs it up ­ we have a new form of memory now, we have a new memory system, it's important to think of these as kind of distributed memory systems, in the end we'll see. And what that means further is not simply that now memory has become easier for me, in some ways it's become more difficult because we could say well my mother (she doesn't remember much some days, but she can remember some things), if I ask her, 'use Amazon.com to help you', it'd be impossible for her. So in that sense it's not necessarily a simpler memory experience or process; it could be more complicated, from the perspective of the individual, the agent involved in using these tools. What it means then, furthermore, is as the system changes with the inclusion of new tools, the nature of the agent in that system changes. I change because now I know how to use Amazon.com. And it's more than just laziness that's at issue here, because as I say in some cases the process could be more complex rather than less so. But the important part is that it's more complex in a different way. It's not the same kind of complexity that we had before. So I think a theme that's going to run throughout what I have to say here is that we need to be looking at how cognition, memory and, more broadly, cultural and social systems, are fundamentally and qualitatively transformed by the inclusion of new cultural tools into them. Rather than simply expand it in some quantitative sense, which is the more typical way we tend to talk about these things, so we talk about the amount of information accessible doubling every whatever months. It always ends up, at first glance anyway, being a quantitative measure as if the world's just becoming bigger and more accessible at our fingertips. But in actuality I think it's more valuable and more useful to talk about how the systems involved in remembering and thinking are qualitatively transformed, rather than just added to or perhaps detracted from, subtracted from. And this kind of technology is of course very advanced in the example I've given you with Amazon.com, very complex, and involves contemporary things that simply weren't available ten years ago or even five years ago at a reasonable speed.
And one more point before I move off Amazon.com and go to actually a simpler, older example, and that is that there is an issue of... it's not simply the technical availability of this system but it's one that has very much to do with accessibility in terms of my position in a cultural and economic system. In my office I have high speed access to Amazon.com. The majority of the world's population doesn't. And so this again raises questions all the way from the kind of the cultural and economic factors of the digital divide to the nature of human agency and cognition at the psychological individual level that we would want to talk about. Let me take you to another much older example that's been used as an illustration in cognitive science. And actually I think if you're British you'll see that I got this wrong in the sense that I use a different system than what I understand people here use. If we take this example here and if I asked you, 'OK everybody tell me what the answer to this is.' Now maybe somebody can do this here in their head, but almost certainly what most of us would do is get out pencil and paper and start multiplying those numbers out like that, moving them over one column at a time and then adding them at the bottom to come up with an answer. Now this is the kind of thing that presumably all of us are familiar with at one level or another. But if I asked at this point, 'well exactly who did this problem?' ­ well, we even have very institutionalised ways of giving credit to individuals for doing this problem or not doing this problem. You say, 'well I did that problem of course'. But then if I said, 'well if you did the problem, in a strict sense, let me take away your pencil and paper,' and of course we would object. But to pursue that for a second further where we'd say, 'well why do you move those numbers over one digit every time when you multiply each, you know by nine, by eight, by four, why do you do that?' Now probably there are a few people here, maybe several of you, who've had a stronger version of number theory or mathematical theory than I have, you'd be able to tell me why you do that. But most people would say, 'well the reason we move those numbers is because Mrs Jones told me in second grade that's the way you do it'. But can you explain the principle? Most of us, no we can't, not in any great detail. And so even for this seemingly simple technology we have something here where there's a ghost in the machine as it were, there's something in operation that we don't understand how it works on the inside. So I might not understand Amazon.com in any meaningful sense whatsoever, but you would think I'd be able to understand this, and I would be hard pressed to give you a very satisfactory explanation for exactly how this works. But notice further ­ and this I think is another point that's relevant for more modern technologies ­ how do we do this, what this actually contributes to our kind of cognitive capacity. What it basically takes advantage of is very powerful human cognitive capacities in the brain, in the individual actually, that have to do with visual kind of spacing. Takes advantage of something that allows you the use of spacing there to do a lot of the work that visually we can make sense of very quickly. It harnesses individual cognitive perceptual skills in a maximum way so it kind of divides up the task, it distributes the task in a very powerful way to allow us to use the skills that we bring quite easily to such a task, in most cases. It couples that kind of natural, relatively easy visual processing capacity, visual memory capacity, with a kind of hardware here, a technology if you will, that offloads the things that are difficult for us to do. So the combination turns out to be very powerful as a matter of fact and probably has evolved to a large extent for some of those reasons that we oftentimes don't think about. But again the major point I want to focus on right now is this issue of who did the multiplication in this case, and the point I want to talk about is that it's not the individual in isolation or the atomistic individual. What this suggests is the basic outline of what I think we should be talking about, and this comes very much out of a combination of the Soviet tradition of Vygotsky, Leontev, Luriya (to some degree we'll be talking also about other figures like Bakhtin), but also figures from the West that I'll mention at a later point. What we're talking about is what I would call mediated action in the two cases ­ the remembering with Amazon.com and the multiplication with the written symbol system. We're talking about mediated action as a unit of analysis for looking at virtually any form of human cognition or memory. Another
way of putting this is that this whole approach views humans as basically tool­using animals. And this shaping of the tools to fit the humans, shaping of the humans to fit the tools, is the basic story we're after throughout the whole effort. And so this notion of humans as tool­using animals means we focus on what I'm calling here mediated action as the unit of analysis ­ mediated action being that first short description up there, namely a combination of an active agent plus a cultural tool or mediational means (I use those terms interchangeably). Again this is central to the whole effort here because there's a strong temptation, for example, to reduce it to either the active agent and say, 'no I did the remembering', or to the cultural tools and say (for example on the topic of collective memory), 'well if you want to know what collective memory is, you should go to the national library, that's where you know cultural collective memory is,' or something like that. Now that's not right in this view because you have to have both of these two elements in this unit of analysis to make sense of either one in the end. And so there's what I would call an irreducible tension between the agent and the cultural tool. It doesn't mean there's necessarily conflict here ­ it does mean there's a kind of friction in all cases, a kind of resistance ­ but basically I use the word 'tension' where other people might want to use the term 'dialectic'. But the problem with dialectic is that dialectic ends up with a synthesis of some kind, which I think is not the proper image here because constantly there are new tools entering into the system, and constantly that sets off another round of demands and kind of easements, so they're making the task of the agent easier. So this irreducible tension is something that I think remains at the core and has to be there in order to talk about this mediated action as a unit of analysis in a meaningful way. Now again, in a sense, what I'm doing here is simply unpacking a set of assumptions that we have about human cognition, about human social and cultural life. In many ways, though, I think these assumptions are oftentimes difficult to pursue or to recognise and to address when we get into our disciplinary mode of academic discourse. So we have whole areas of academic discourse, namely psychology, that tend to look at the individual in isolation. We have others like semiotics that can look at sign systems and the cultural tools in isolation. This says you must keep these together. And somewhat interestingly a group like this oftentimes is where I can find the most kind of theoretical resonance because people realise these two things, of course they're always there, why make a bit deal of it? So I might be preaching to the converted here to some degree but I will go ahead and make these points anyhow. In a socio­cultural analysis of human action, culture, cognition, communication, the central task is to understand how individual mental functioning is related to and shaped by the socio­cultural setting in which it exists. So the central task is understanding how individual functioning is shaped by and related to that socio­cultural setting at the top. And here again we have big disciplinary divides. We have disciplines that look at individual functioning of course ­ psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science in most of its contemporary brands. We have disciplines that look at the socio­cultural setting ­ sociology, anthropology oftentimes. But the trick is, how are you going to put these things together in any kind of meaningful way. And what I'm suggesting here is the solution that's been proposed some decades ago, and we revisit every once in a while in the West as well, namely that we put mediated action as a kind of linking construct here to make sense of exactly how it is that the socio­cultural setting has this impact on individual functioning and conversely how individual functioning could transform the socio­cultural setting. Oftentimes we start out with the top and bottom lines there but the issue in a lot of ways is how are you going to connect them in some kind of principled way that's going to make sense then of the whole big picture. So summarising up to this point we can say the issue here is the claim that humans are tool­using animals, and the goal of a lot of this analysis then is to make these cultural tools and their impact visible. Because oftentimes they seem to disappear into the individual and we attribute too much to individuals, whereas what we're really talking about is individuals always in collaboration with cultural tools, to emphasise or recognise a heavy reliance on
the cultural tools, and oftentimes we might recognise these cultural tools but we use them with very little recognition of their inner workings. Let me give you another example of a cultural tool that would seem some way away from what we're talking about at this meeting, but nonetheless bears a lot of possibilities for spinning out the implications of this general approach. I want to talk for a minute about pole vaulting. Pole vaulting is an interesting kind of sport, it has a lot of affordances for talking about mediated action, then extending that talk to other things. But one of the reasons I like to talk about pole vaulting is because the cultural tool in this case is very visible material and not easy to miss as it is with other kinds of verbal routines for example. Namely we're talking about of course the actual physical pole that's used in pole vaulting. Now first of all if we talk about the defining feature of mediated action as this irreducible tension between the active agent and the cultural tool it should be evident right away that pole vaulting simply doesn't exist if you don't talk about both elements of this. It wouldn't count as pole vaulting if I could leap say 18 feet in the air over a bar without the aid of a pole, there's simply no way you can participate in this event without having both the pole and the user. The first point to recognise about this irreducible tension is this is not saying that somehow our responsibility has now been shifted from the individual to the pole. No one here is capable of using a modern graphite pole that's used in Olympic pole vaulting to go a level of five or six or seven metres, I'm pretty sure that's the case. So the point is there has to be a great deal of skill involved in doing this. And so if we start talking that way we start saying the best pole vaulter in the world is from Ukraine and he's totally unique and it's all in his skill, and that then gets us to slip too far over on the other side of this irreducible tension ­ we're looking at the agent in isolation. Because if you just took a quick history of pole vaulting there's some very interesting things happen. Pole vaulting is something that grew out of early games in the Highlands as far as we can tell, a couple of centuries ago, where people tried to jump across streams or something, across a horizontal distance, and they used poles made of oak or ash. And very early Olympic pole vaulters used poles that were not so unlike those early poles used a century or two earlier, they used ash and sometimes oak poles. But by 1904 they came up with the use of a bamboo pole. And the person who used the bamboo pole went higher than anybody had ever gone using an oak or an ash pole. And the reason becomes very obvious, without thinking too much, bamboo is much lighter, it's sufficiently strong usually, it seldom breaks under the weight of a human body, but it's much lighter than oak or ash, allowing pole vaulters to gain additional speed running down the ramp towards the pole box. So the idea here was you needed something that was going to be light and strong. The lighter it got the faster you could go but it still had to be sufficiently strong of course. Now during that time the greatest pole vaulter of all time, Cornelius Warmerdam, vaulted for a period of 16 years, he won four Olympic gold medals and his record stood for a long time until the appearance of a new cultural tool, namely the aluminium pole. The aluminium pole emerged some time in the '50s I believe and this was something that was even lighter and stronger. And the point here is that if we try to think about this, we're thinking about something like added power in computing or something ­ the locus of the change in mediated action is not in the isolated individual, or the atomistic individual, rather it's in the cultural tool it seems, although always having to be used in an intelligent and skilled way by the pole vaulter. Well those records held for a number of years until the '60s, at which point something new happened completely, a new kind of pole material emerged, namely fibreglass. And with the advent of the fibreglass pole (and virtually all of us have seen people only use fibreglass poles), for the first time there was a quite new technique that emerged. Namely the fibreglass pole would bend so people would run down the ramp, plant the pole and use the bending of the pole as part of the performance, use the bending to push them, to snap themselves up over the cross bar. It's not easy, it sounds like it's easy. But actually what happened, a huge debate broke out at that point about whether this was the same sport at all. Whether it was fair to call it pole vaulting or whether we should keep the same records or have one set of records for aluminium poles and another set for fibreglass poles. There was an American named Don Bragg, who had used the aluminium pole and was very upset when people came along and started using a fibreglass pole. And he started talking about
how you don't have to have any skill any more ­ you're just a human projectile. Somebody else pointed out about Bragg two things ­ firstly that he never complained when he used aluminium poles and broke Cornelius Warmerdom's record, so it didn't seem to bother him at that point that we'd changed tools, and secondly that this very good aluminium pole vaulter could not use a fibreglass pole to go as high as he could with an aluminium pole. So it again points out the fact it's not simply the cultural tool that does all the work here, it's wrong to call the pole vaulters human projectiles, it always involves a great deal of particular skill, and he didn't have it. He had it for one cultural tool but not for another. And it's counter­intuitive at first because we think well you have a great advantage using this new tool, but actually in some cases people seem to be better off using a more primitive tool. It's also interesting, and I'll come back to this in a little while, to think where did this cultural tool come from. If you think about the production of cultural tools it bears on some of the topics we talked about this morning I think. Fibreglass was not invented in order to help pole vaulters, instead what we had here was a new material that emerged, as far as I can tell, largely as part of the military industrial complex looking for new materials for aviation. And then its use spun off over into making fibreglass poles. So here we have something that's another and very important thing to keep in mind when talking about mediated action. You say, 'well where did these cultural tools come from?' And the point is, the suggestion, the implication is, in many cases they're not developed for the current purposes they have, they're developed for quite other reasons and there's this spin­off effect into a new region of human performance. So suddenly we have somebody using material in pole vaulting where the material was never developed for that purpose. Now usually we think of this as having beneficial effects but I'm going to explore some cases later where we can ask (going back to the discussions we had this morning with Jim Norton), is this spin­off process a benefit or a curse. Through all these cases we're going to be asking who's doing the acting, that's the basic question here that we want to use to guide us as we consider the notion of mediated action and some of its implications. The basic idea here is that we need to reconceptualise mind and that's what mediated action is. Mediated action in a sense takes the place of mind. Mind, we oftentimes conceptualise it, because it is so much tied again to the isolated individual that we want to talk about mediated action or about the fact that mind extends beyond the skin. Which again does not mean there's nothing left in the skin for the pole vaulter or for the person doing a multiplication or hopefully for myself doing the remembering with the help of Amazon.com. So an essential psychological dimension remains but it's different with different kinds of cultural tools and these different kinds of mixes of mediated action. And so psychological processes are viewed as fundamentally linked, then, to these cultural tools. If you take the notion of intelligence, it has largely been thought of as something that's a property of the isolated individual. We measure individuals' intelligence in all kinds of ways, for example if people know their IQs or something, this becomes a defining part of who they are. One of the implications of this set of claims right here, mind extending beyond the skin, is that if we were going to define intelligence in this context we'd say intelligence is the ability to use culturally valued tools, and it's loaded with several things. What it means is that people who might have been intelligent in the context of other tools might no longer be intelligent at all. Or people who had not been intelligent suddenly become intelligent. If you think about the examples we had this morning ­ a very interesting talk by Norman Johnston about dyslexia for example. Well without literacy, without a literate society there is no dyslexia, there's no impediment or no handicap or no kind of problem with intelligence of that sort. But more generally we start wondering if intelligence is anything other than using these culturally valued tools. And this is again a place where the cultural tools become invisible, because we have a very deep­seated belief that there's a general intelligence or maybe specialised intelligence or multiple intelligences that belong to the individual. But just as is the case with genes and their environment, the point here is you cannot even know what intelligence is without making explicit or implicit assumptions about the cultural
tools that provide the environment for measuring that intelligence. And with the advent of new cultural tools, for example with the internet and the web using more visual kinds of displays and relying less on sequential processing of symbolic systems as in literacy, it's entirely possible that those of us who were judged to be intelligent in one setting will become less so. So the point here is that with these kinds of claims we start to redefine a lot of the basic notions we have when operating in psychology and related disciplines. I just want to outline some of what I'm calling properties of mediated actions, some things that we need to keep in mind when talking about mediated action if we do put it at the centre of our conceptual framework. The first property of mediated action is that the cultural tools always have both affordances and constraints. This is a way of talking about some of the things that we heard this morning from Jim Norton about benefits and curses. He uses stronger language in his case, looking at a particular set of cultural tools, but what this means is that any cultural tool we use both affords certain possibilities, makes certain kinds of cognition or human action possible, but also constrains us in some ways that we often times have little knowledge about. Let me give you another example here of something that virtually all of us uses to play out this notion of affordances and constraints that'll come back up with another property of mediated action as well. Namely, if we look at the keyboard that we use, does everybody here use a QWERTY keyboard on the computer? Probably in this audience there's enough people who know that the QWERTY keyboard didn't descend from heaven or from Moses, it came up through a particular historical context, and actually is not the most efficient keyboard that we have. It was the most efficient and most appropriate keyboard at one time, in the era of the mechanical typewriter when the biggest impediment to speed was having keys locked together which occurred because you could type two keys together too fast. Hence engineers, human factors, developed the QWERTY keyboard. Which meant that you put the more frequently used keys on your left hand, which for most of us is a weaker hand, and don't put very common letters together so that they can be typed by two different fingers. Like E D in English, if you're touch typing you have to do one and then the other in sequence. Given how frequently E D is used, putting E and D on your two index fingers would make the most sense. But the QWERTY keyboard was developed in an age when we had to slow down the speed of typing of sequential letters. But of course the need to slow down typing has long passed, it was passed with the advent of electric typewriters, let alone computers. But does anybody not use a QWERTY keyboard here though? As we've moved across historical periods the point here is that the cultural tools that had particular affordances in one historical setting, namely the historical setting of the technology of the mechanical typewriter, now actually have constraints built into them. Why do we continue to use something that's so clearly a constraining factor, especially because we have alternatives which are readily available in any modern computer, that increase your speed, reduce your errors? We have excuses for why we haven't converted over to a QWERTY keyboard, but what this means in these terms is that we're using a cultural tool that at one time had clear affordances that now has clear constraints. Going back to the point that I was making before, the introduction of a new cultural tool ­ the transformation of mediated action, in the pole vaulting example. It fundamentally transformed pole vaulting when the bendable pole, the fibreglass pole was introduced into the sport. It transformed it so much that some people who had been very good at it at one time became less good at it later, with having to use the new pole. But think about any of the examples I've given you today... the advent of the Arabic numeral system instead of the Roman numeral system, which made it possible for us to imagine all kinds of everyday mathematical operations that are next to impossible with the old technology. I'm using very old technologies to make my points but I think probably the wheels are spinning in some of your heads about the way this works out in contemporary terms. Or Amazon.com again. Is my memory the same? No it's not the same as it was before I could use Amazon.com. The memory system is fundamentally different. The end result might be faster, better, more accurate, but the process and the system itself has been transformed into something that simply was almost unimaginable in years before.
So the basic picture we have here of this second property comes straight out of Vygotsky. Vygotsky wrote a paper in 1930 called The Instrumental Method in Psychology, and in that paper he makes a very nice concise formulation of this point, where he argues that with the appearance of any new cultural tool, or what he called a psychological tool, the mental processes involved are fundamentally transformed. What this means is they're not simply made more efficient, they're not simply made easier, but they're qualitatively transformed. When I use Amazon.com to remember, it doesn't speed up my memory ­ it's less efficient in one way ­ I have to have all this stuff in front of me, but the fact is I use it. And the only way to talk about this is not a matter of being more efficient, it's not a matter simply of expanding in quantity the amount of things I can remember, it's qualitatively transformed what that system is. Another property I want to mention here, number three, is that many of the cultural tools that we use have emerged through accident or contingency, are some kind of spin­off in the production mode, as in the case with the fibreglass pole. Fibreglass was not developed in order to help pole vaulters, and yet it did. But I think you know we probably could come up with examples here, in the discussion of some things that have been spin offs that are not so beneficial. In fact what perhaps is most often the case, and counter­intuitively again having to do with this invisibility of cultural tools, is that we are using tools that were not developed for the purposes to which we now put them. That's the common assumption for most of the cultural tools we use (this is what we could call the benign assumption, or the glass half full assumption), is that we think those tools out there ­ be they computer programs, be they poles for pole vaulting, be they internet links or whatever ­ they've been set up to help us. There's a whole literature on this in the case of language. On the one hand Vygotsky, for example, tended to look at language as a great gift to humans, as a great empowering force or cultural tool for human cognition, memory, other mental functions. And for the most part that's the way we look at it in many of the things we're talking about here. Vygotsky's assumption largely was a very optimistic one, namely that language emerged and provided a net benefit for virtually everything we do. At the same time he was writing there's a whole school of the Russian formalists of literary and semiotic and analysts who are writing about what later got called the 'prison house' of language. The point being here that actually yes, language does allow us to do many things, but it also imprisons us in a perspective in many cases that make it very dangerous, detrimental. So the point here being that a lot of times where these dangers or detriments come from is because the tool was never invented or developed in the service of the particular use it has right now in the first place. This goes along with the separating out of the fourth property here of mediated action, namely the historical inertia in the production of cultural tools. The problem of outdated constraints, the constraints that were there, that were actually affordances at one point. Going back to language... I mean if we think very broadly now, and we have some very big implications to this that go beyond what I'm prepared to talk about or competent to talk about today... the very strange things that have happened with language. In a meeting like this, in any academic setting (at least in the post­enlightenment or enlightenment period of human history in the West), we assume that we can use language to arrive at rational decisions, rational decision procedures, rational discussions of various kinds of issues ­ be they social issues, design issues, engineering issues, whatever. So we assume that the human language is a perfectly good tool for rational argumentation, reflection and thought. The fact is human language evolved for at least 100,000 years, before the enlightenment era ever began ­ that's such a big period compared to the modern era that it began basically almost before literacy began. Human language did not evolve in the service of rational argumentation, human language evolved, as far as can tell from various anthropological and ethnological studies, in the service of human rituals, social solidarity kind of rituals, things that are non­rational or anti­rational if anything. They had to do with creating and maintaining coherent social groups, through emotional and ritualistic uses of language, which in most cases are simply antithetical to any rational use of language. The big story here is that we have a tool that evolved for tens of thousands of years, and
suddenly come the 19th century or wherever you want to count it, suddenly on a mass scale we decided, 'we can use this language, we're going to harness this language to carry out rational argumentation'. You're harnessing a tool that was never designed for that, as a matter of fact it was designed to avoid rationality ­ we didn't have rationality so we couldn't avoid it in the sense of knowingly avoid it ­ but it instinctively stayed away from anything that would be rational, logical, deductive etc, because this was in the service of human social life which oftentimes called on people to accept authority and to be involved in human ritualistic practices. And so here we have a very strange case ­ it's like the QWERTY keyboard carried to the 'n'th degree ­ we have a cultural tool, the most powerful one we have, or I should say the most ubiquitous one we have, being harnessed to do something that it was almost explicitly designed not to do, and yet we do it. Now of course what this means is that we've had all kinds of attempts to clean up language, that's certainly, for example, what a lot of symbolic logic was about. The Vienna school, a lot of 20th century philosophy has been about ways of overcoming these sad sloppy tendencies we have in natural language, the development of whole new alternative systems, symbolic logic. Why would we have to have that if we had language already? Well the reason we had that historically is because people realise human language is nearly impossible to use in a clear way for rational decisions, rational argumentation. And hence we need to develop alternative languages, and that's what we have symbolic logic for basically ­ it reduces all the ambiguity, the sloppiness, the problems with human language. In the general sense, then, what this raises is that the cultural tools we're employing often weren't designed for their current uses. And of course that goes, as I understand it, for a lot of the things that many people here study ­ computers were not designed in order to help children learn in schools, originally they were all designed for space, military industrial complex kinds of uses. And in a sense we could say sometimes we're using the wrong tool, like using the QWERTY keyboard to type today is in an important sense the wrong tool. Using English or any other naturally evolved human language to think rationally is using the wrong tool. It's almost to the point where you could say we're misusing those tools, we're using them for some purpose other than that for which they evolved or were designed, and as a result maybe we could trace some of the problems we have to this fact ­ this fact that we're trying to make tools do things they were never designed to do but we're not entertaining the possibility that maybe we should think of a completely different sets of tools. Because again, going back to the issue of the invisibility of cultural tools, what tends to happen in such instances is that we think either there's a temporary limitation in the tool that I have now, but wait till the next generation of Microsoft comes out, that'll take care of all those things, or we say there's something wrong with you, the user, you haven't harnessed this tool in the right way. And I'm not talking simply about not knowing all the advantages of using a tool, but I'm saying in many cases actually we might have designed something that's counter­intuitive from the perspective of what we would have designed, had we started with the problems or the issues or the processes you have in mind at this point. It's like trying to use English to reason rationally when it was never designed to do that. Now this leads us to a couple of concluding points. I just want to spend a minute talking about what you could call the production of cultural tools, because I have more to say on their consumption in a minute. In understanding mediated action and this approach to human cognition, culture and communication, the point here is that we need to have some kind of way of breaking this down into manageable analytic tasks, because it sounds like what I'm saying is, 'well you have to know everything about history, cultural anthropology, social anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, hopefully computer science as well, and then you can start to talk about it'. Well we're not about to do that of course. And so part of the task here is of creating a language and a set of analytic categories that allow us to break into this seemingly impossible holistic system and gain some insight, without losing our footing and saying, 'yeah but it depends on all the other pieces which you haven't talked about'.
And one of the basic cuts we can make that I think is useful here, is if we put cultural tools at the centre of the story, mediated action with the cultural tools. One of the issues we can raise then is, 'well where do those cultural tools come from?' This again has to do with the invisibility of cultural tools, we seldom question where these tools come from. What about the QWERTY keyboard? Most people, maybe outside of this audience, most people say well, 'it was designed so you could be fast and efficient and relatively error free typist, right?' Um... no. Looking at the history and the forces of production of cultural tools gets to be very crucial then. In the case of language it wasn't produced, it wasn't designed, it evolved in response to certain needs. Note my earlier comments that English was not designed but rather evolved in response to certain social solidarity needs over most of its history, not just English but natural language. But if we start thinking about this with other cultural tools, where do various search engines come from? I mean there production is right in your face literally in the sense that suddenly you have a set of advertisements. When I got my ticket to come here I went to one of these supposedly completely open free market aeroplane ticket buying sites, which uses Sabre, the reservation system that was developed by American Airlines some 20 years ago. And guess what, if you want to go from one place to another, even if you search by price, sometimes you're going to come up with an all American Airlines route to get there, and if you know enough to look in other places well maybe you'd find actually it's not the lowest price. So we begin to ask well who produces these cultural tools? Who puts the demands on us to perform well in these cultural tools? I think some of the debate this morning ­ why do we have to keep learning some of these old things when we're not going to be using them in the future ­ it has to do with these production questions. And these can be very heated in many cases, and it's interesting what happens when we try to come up with new cultural tools that people are not used to. I think about the very heated debate we had in the United States for a number of years about the uses by children of calculators in mathematics classrooms. And all kinds of objections... it was basically like the fibreglass pole, 'you're just making them into human projectiles'... you know, 'they don't have to think any more'. But the point is with the appearance of new cultural tools oftentimes it's not exactly clear where the old ones came from. Sometimes for the first time we ask, 'where did the old ones come from?' and in some cases there are very surprising results to this. And so it's a question we need to ask. But I'd like to turn mostly to the other side of this analytic divide, namely the consumption of cultural tools. I think it bears on the discussion we had this morning in the sense that oftentimes we get so taken up with the appearance of new cultural tools that we assume we understand everything about how they're going to be used. I mean it was like when Al Gore said, 'if I could just get a computer in every classroom I'd solve American education problems,' or something like that. The point is we oftentimes assume that if cultural tools are available then they're going to be consumed in one straightforward way. But here we enter into the other side of the equation ­ the production and consumption side of the study of mediated action. Active agents using cultural tools use them in creative transformative ways. There are even cases where a cultural tool appears on the scene in order to be used in one way and systematically gets used in another way and ends up taking a life of its own in this new arena. I think when talking about this it's also useful in many ways to avoid the term 'internalisation', it's something that I try to do throughout this discussion. Internalisation is a term that's very misleading here and it's linked to our old notions of intelligence I think in many ways. We can internalise all kinds of things, but internalise skills, concepts, values. The problem with this is the term internalisation of course itself is a cultural tool, it has implications right away that lead us to look inside of the individual, in your brain or somewhere inside you for the site of this skill, value or whatever. I think the more appropriate set of ways for talking about this has to do a bit perhaps with the comments this morning about tacit knowledge. When talking about cultural tools, rather than talking about internalising them I think we ought to be talking about mastering them. That's not just a word switch here, it's something that I think has much bigger implications. Because what we want to talk about first of all is knowing how to use cultural tools, that's the essence of what we're talking about. There's no interesting
sense in which you want to say that a cultural tool has been internalised ­ I mean hopefully for little kids it includes things like little toys or something, you don't want them to be internalised in any basic sense, no you want to know how well you can use a cultural tool ­ what is your level of knowing how. It's exactly in this context for example that intelligence comes up. And this is where the debates about ­ in my view anyway ­ calculators come up. In a sense you are intelligent if you know how to use a calculator effectively and accurately, appropriately, in the context of solving a maths problem ­ that constitutes a modern form of intelligence. Some people still won't accept that and say, 'no that's not intelligence, intelligence is if you can run through that thing on that piece of paper'. But what if I were to bring in something that some of you here actually had at one time and know how to use, but some of you maybe have to go into a science and technology museum to see ­ a slide rule. At one time the quality of intelligence for an engineer was measured in many ways and throughout many courses on the ability to use a slide rule, and understand some of the principles on which a slide rule operates. How many people here have ever had a slide rule and knew how to use one at one time? So I can pretty much tell your ages by if you raise your hand. How many people have never had a slide rule in their hands? Never seen one or never had one in your hands. Well I can tell your age as well. The point is cultural tools provide the equivalent of the environment in which genes operate, cultural tools provide the environment in which intelligent action occurs. And this again is a general point, but it's one that slips our mind all the time I think. I think it has to do with the way we understand individual and group differences, the whole issue of the digital divide I think, and the intelligence, the assumptions about intelligence that go with that, oftentimes are put inside people rather than talking about and knowing how. And this is a big difference actually if you follow out its implications ­ a philosophical difference, but it turns out to be one that has very serious practical implications. So at one point you know the syntax of multiplication that I talked about there, maybe somebody here knows how to use an abacus, very few of us do in a very effective way. There have been whole studies of this for example by colleagues in Japan, who have demonstrated short cuts that you can use with the abacus. Well to be intelligent in that context meant using that cultural tool effectively. So I think what I've done here is I've not given you a set of prescriptions, and in some cases not even descriptions, of specific issues in cognitive science or in culture and communication, but rather it constitutes an attempt to unpack some of the assumptions that we have that are lying under the radar, as we put it. We don't see these when we go off to talk about what's the best thing to use here, the best thing to use there. I'd like to end with going back to one other case here, the one that Norman Johnston talked about, because some of these points that I'm making here can be nowhere better illustrated than what he's talking about there. It's very interesting that in at least the American setting, when we talk about education for the handicapped we oftentimes talk about re­mediation, which is an absolutely perfect term for this perspective. Because if you start thinking of human intelligence in the context of mediated action, intelligence is the ability to use culturally valued tools, so the ability to use cultural tools in general and then culturally valued tools, that's where power and authority come into the picture ­ a point to which I'll return in a second. The point is what Johnston has done brilliantly here it seems to me, he's backed off and said, 'wait a minute, we have people here, yes, who have disabilities by the standards of the norm' ­ well if you think back a few hundred years I have a very severe disability by the standards of the norm, namely I wouldn't have had glasses. We don't count that. And why don't we count glasses whereas we do count not being able to type on a keyboard as a disability? It has everything to do with what kinds of cultural tools are accepted as the norm. Somehow society is defining those. We have the power and authority to define what counts as the norm by which you are going to be measured. Just like at one point it would have been impossible to diagnose anybody with dyslexia, you know 800 years ago, because virtually nobody was literate. Well today we have a whole new set of disabilities and one of the things that we can ask is, what is it we're after here?
Are we after the isolated individual, the intelligence, the brain? Or are we after mediated action, which I would claim is the only thing we have to operate with as a general framework in the first place. If we're after mediated action then you're faced with the issue of what do you do when you have somebody who has difficulty dealing in the contemporary context of cultural tools. You can change the individual and we do a lot of that ­ we butt people's heads against a wall to drill them, to drill them, to drill them, to learn how to recognise a P versus a B. On the other hand you can change the cultural tools, and there are options at least in some cases for changing the cultural tools that constitute precisely re­mediation. And that's what he's done. And that's what I've seen other brilliant people in learning disabilities and related fields do. They enter a situation and they can look immediately and say, 'if I change these two little things...' ­ I've seen this actually happen ­ 'I can change two little things in this context so that you won't even know there is a learning disability'. Well you won't even know that this child has been diagnosed as learning disabled, put it that way. Which finally brings me to this issue of the power and authority that's built into cultural tools. They have been produced and accepted by the powerful forces in any society. That's who decides whether you get out of high school by certain criteria or not. They tend to be middle class in our country, we have very big problems on this score in terms of the fact that middle class values are not necessarily those of others. And it's not a simple problem because some people say we have to celebrate the particular cultural tools and particular mental skills that go with them of minority children. The principal side of that, I think, is if you do that you're guaranteeing that they will never enter into mainstream society, so it's a complicated political question. But lying behind these issues in many cases it's not some kind of abstract ephemeral social force, but it's channelled through and manageable through the cultural tool system that we have in front of people, that we all must operate with or are demanded to operate with. But in some cases people with sufficient imagination can come up with alternative cultural tools and say, 'actually if you're having a terrible time operating there's no real reason you have to go through with that cultural tool to get where I'm going or where you want to go. Let's use this cultural tool over here'. Why not? And I think that's one of the most practical implications in light of the discussions we were having earlier today. And it raises the whole question, going back to what I started out with here, of what Martin Freeth (and also a colleague of mine in St Louis, Walter Ong) talked about, that with the print revolution and the rise of mass media, human consciousness was fundamentally transformed. It not only is no longer the consciousness we had in the pre­ literate days, but we actually cannot go back and appreciate what it means to be pre­ literate any more. Walter Ong made very strong claims about this. In a discussion with him before he died he said, 'oh I know these people are talking about the computers and internet and all this kind of thing, that's another revolution'. He said, 'it's really not'. I asked him if he owned a computer, he said, 'no'. But the point is I think we're right in the midst of something in this time that's equivalent to the print revolution and the fundamental cultural and social and cognitive transformations that societies underwent then. And we don't know exactly where we're going now, but we're in the middle of this massive transformation of cultural tools requiring a massive transformation of what counts as intelligence, what counts as effective mastery etc. And for that reason it's an exciting time I think in general, and for that reason it's a very exciting opportunity for me to be here to talk to people who think about those cultural tools at the cutting edge, which is usually ­ as you can see from my media and from my examples ­ not where I'm at.