In this paper, James Paul Gee first sketches out the background to the approach he takes to literacy and technology—a “situated-sociocultural” approach. By this term he means a blend of themes from work on situated cognition dealing with mind and learning and work on sociocultural approaches to language, literacy, and technology. He sketches out this background by over viewing several interdisciplinary intellectual movements that have arisen over the last few decades. He starts with the New Literacy Studies and moves on to Situated Cognition Studies, The New Literacies Studies, and the New Media Literacy Studies.
After this background sketch, he turns to one specific application of the ideas in this sketch to the interactions between literacy and technology in and out of schools. This application starts with reading and ends with a discussion of video games.