Concept formation and the text in digital culture

Abstract

During cultural-historical development, our learning processes have evolved to using diverse “symbolic artifacts – signs, symbols, texts, formulae” (Kozulin et al. 2003: 15) as mediators of knowledge and meaning. The phenomenon of a text became one of the most advanced of these mediators, as it goes beyond the mere mediation of knowledge. According to Lotman, the text is a semiotic system “capable of transforming messages received and generating new ones, a generator of information” (1988: 57). The evolution of digital culture and the new media environment have shaped the representation and interaction with texts by “changing the static printed text into a dynamic one” (Ojamaa and Torop 2020: 52). Digitality, multimodality and transmediality became intrinsic characteristics of texts in the new media environment. While this emphasizes the value of acquiring the concept of the text within formal and informal education as an “intellectual device” (Lotman 1988: 55) and a cultural tool for accessing knowledge in digital culture, the semiotic and cognitive processes beyond the acquisition of the concept of the text remain under-researched. The paper represents the first step in the broader study of how young learners acquire the concept of the text in contemporary digital culture. The research aims to identify semiotic processes behind acquiring the concept of the text in digital culture. To this purpose, we introduce Vygotsky's theory of concept formation (2012) as a methodological tool for semiotic research in learning and education.