ACTIVITY THEORY* As one of the possible frameworks to analyse human activities in digitally mediated environments

The Activity Theory is a framework for studying human interactions that has its roots in the second decade of the last century in Russia by Leont'ev, and Sergei Rubinstein; used since then to study human activities, it has been considered by many essential to understand them from a broader point of view than the one of psychology or even social psychology.

The Activity Theory takes human activities as a basic unit for analysing individuals and contexts: every human action is, in fact, studied in relation with others and other elements. In this way, humans are contextualized in a stronger way than the one offered by the most traditional psychological disciplines.
Not only it considers the environment of the actions, but also their temporal relationship with previous and future actions. In this way, human activities are being contextualised in a web of narratives, allowing a deeper understanding of the motivations that move the individuals.

Another essential focus of the activity theory is on the artifacts and their mediating role. As interaction happens within the limitations of instruments, the activity theory tries to define what is the role of those. How are the instruments that we use influencing our actions?
When considering the deep effect that limitations can have on our actions a very interesting example comes from the new generation of social networking platforms born with Twitter. The popular social network (which has at the present time about 200 million active users) has gained momentum thanks to its extremely restricted blogging space. While other blogging platforms were allowing their users to write "as much as they wanted", Twitter restricted its user's space to 140 characters, less than a usual text message.
By doing so, it disrupted the precedent status quo of the blogosphere and created a new genre, a new language and a whole new way of communicating through the internet. It seems to me a great example of how limitations in instruments can not only influence our behaviour but also create brand new genres. What described here is, obviously, not the only example: in all the history of technology limitations have deeply influenced our usage of tools and instruments.

Another major contribution to the activity theory comes from Enjeström. In his writings he says that "humans are able to control their behaviour through artefacts". ( Enjeström 1999:29)
He also adds some elements to the basic framework created by Leont’ev.
While Leont’ev uses a structure that includes a subject, an object, an used tool and an outcome, Enjestrom adds some elements which more connect to society and culture.

It is interesting to consider how the activity theory becomes extremely relevant nowadays while we look at the interactions that happen online, especially when we think of the social dynamics that happen in the sphere of social networks. People who have access to the statistics of big web portals, for example, know clearly how much simple changes in the digital environment influence the behaviour of their users. It is extremely relevant nowadays to study the role of the limitations applied by digital interfaces, because these are the artifacts that carry most of the communication in today’s life. Little changes applied to an instrument used by millions of people can make a great difference in the way we use our devices, and as a related consequence, to our lives.

Studying interactions with digitally mediated environments seems a bit hard when thinking of the actions that we perform on the web: if we agree that most of our actions are “diffused” in different locations (email, chats, social networks and real life), the narratives that we produce demonstrate to be, in fact, extremely complicated, almost impossible to track down, if not with a deep, accurate study.
Thus, this holistic approach could help us to better understand the real dynamics that drive the interactions between humans and computers. In this sense it’s interesting to see that most of the usability tests performed consider only the use of one piece of software at the time, and not the real usage of computers in everyday life (which normally includes strong multitasking)
It seems to me harder to study the usage of digital devices through the activity theory because of the strong tendency to multitasking that we have, possibly even stronger than the multitasking we perform in the analog world.