Text: Geisler encourages us to think about how our understanding of “text” changes with new text technologies. “As information technologies re-mediate paper-based technologies, however, our prototypical view works less well even for those texts that look like a ‘text’. Texts in word processors, for instance, have many attributes beyond what a paper-based medium affords. Words have attributes of time, date and even authorship, which can be used to display editing changes. Words can be assigned attributes for annotations, hypertextual links, and stylistic characteristics, all of which can be used to control the readers’ experience” (129). She defines a text later in her chapter: “an arrangement of discursive symbols which was read, written, or transformed by the operation” (140).
Activity Theory: Unlike most of the authors in this book, Geilser focuses on a specific part of activity theory. “Activity theory provides a useful analytic framework for this purpose. One of the major contributions of activity theory has been the integration of a psychological account of individual development with a sociohistorical account of the development of culture. At any given time and place, the collocation of actors, motives, and mediational means that constitute an activity are taken to be the result of a convergence of two lines of development:
- the cultural history of the mediational means that, as a kind of legacy, provides a set of physical, mental, and social resources by which current motives can be pursued; and
- the developmental history of individual agents, which produces a set of desires and dissatisfactions embedded in a set of personal techniques and tools.
She also argues that, in light of her analysis, we need to rethink activity theory.
- Way 1: “According to activity theory, each activity is directly linked to the motive which shapes it…: One motive, one activity” (151).
- Way 2: “The management of a task was separated from the doing of the task. As a result, an organization’s motive for task management were split apart from workers’ motives for the task itself” (151).
- Way 3: “[W]hen task management and the task itself are separated, any action sequence associated with task management needs to be understood both as part of the motive-driven activity we might call “the project” and as part of the motive-driven activity we might call ‘getting organized.’ The marketplace success of Palm Technologies testifies to the compelling reality of ‘getting organized’ as a activity in itself independent of any specific projects” (153).