La escritura de la organización social y la situación alfabetizada de la cognicion: Extendiendo las implicaciones sociales de la escritura de Jack Goody

Abstract

Reading and writing engage deeply social and psychological processes, connecting people's thoughts, perceptions, experiences, and projects into wider collectivities of organized action and belief. Jack Goody's groundbreaking work on the consequences of literacy opened up investigations of both social and psychological changes that followed from the introduction and elaboration of literacy over the last five thousand years. Concepts of genre and activity system are useful in refining, extending Goody's initial insights, providing mechanisms for the historical and social elaboration and differentiation of literate practices, with consequences for the kinds of things we share, think about, and cooperate on, as well as for the kinds of organized situations and activities within which we do so. These processes are generative of shared information, knowledge, and thought. This essay examines these theoretical insights in the context recent historical and social investigations into the social construction of the built symbolic environment.