The New Literacy Studies & The "Social Turn"

I don't know about anyone else, but I found this interesting but repetative as well (which considering what he was doing in the article is understandable). I agree with most of them, and found the sociohistorical psychology met my views well. We do "internalize", "appropriate", basically assimilate images and patterns and words from the social activities in which we've taken part, and make them our own. The social imprints us with these images and ideas, and in exchange some imprint the social. Situational cognition, he tells us, argue that knowledge and intelligence reside not solely in heads, but are distributed across social practices, various tools, technologies that a "community of practice" uses to go through its various activities. Science and technolgy studies state knowledge is a matter of "coordinating" and "getting coordinated" by collegues, objects, etc. I'm not just listing various points made in the paper, there is a point to this. All of these things are true, but then where does that leave intellect?

Is intellect then the ability to store all of these patterns and ideas and coordinating them, assimilating them and producing them in a "community of practice?" If so I opt out. Yes, we learn through these various means, we are a communal people for the most part, but it seems that the purely intellectual ideas that come to stand out to us come from an individual mind, just a head. King wasn't going along with the social the most common social knowledge when he wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." I'm sure there are many more examples, but that's what popped into my head. So then, if we gain most of our knowledge from socially constructed areas, obviously we're all in grad school, what is the man or woman who can take those constructions and create new ones. Is he a part of the social turn, or no. Yeah, yeah, another silly question.

Maggie