ИСТИНА

The claim that the human mind is designed by a set of socially available cultural technologies aimed to compensate for various shortcomings of elementary mental functions is in line with Vygotsky’s original theoretical framework. Since humans incorporate semiotic psychological tools provided by the culture through technologically mediated activities, the technical means really matter. Whereas Vygotsky himself dealt with the acquisition and internalization of traditional systems of psychological tools, he had never worked on the issue of novel means construction. These traditional technologies such as “language; various systems of counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes; diagrams; maps and mechanical drawing; all sorts of conventional signs” (Vygotsky, 1981, p.137) evolved gradually within the thousands of years of history. In contrast, I focus on photography as an example of the transformative technology, which has shaped the contemporary human mind in an extraordinary swift manner. Photography came into play in the mid-1800s and redefined the way people perceive the world, remember the past, foresee the future and understand themselves. First, photographs are taken with the intention for future recall and therefore they are means of selective attention and voluntary encoding. Second, in accord with Vygotsky’s concept of replacement, photographs serve as a substitute of iconic and, partially, of episodic memory. And third, photography gave rise to autobiographical memory, i.e. a higher mental function that consists of the ability to possess an entire life story and to retrieve unique episodes attributed to personal past with high subjective confidence. In this vein, photographs serve as an external component of the autobiographical memory system for access both to memories that otherwise would be forgotten and to entire personal identity at different life periods. To sum up, I insist that an artefact that emerged so recently in history has significantly modified both cognition and personality.