Meeting 2 Notes

Co-ordinator = Rebecca Herron

PARTICIPANTS

• We should try to go further, perhaps by asking each other questions and trying to answer them. Or if we don't have the answers, we can propose possible research areas about understanding society. I think that there is one society and there are national systems within it. Through the evolution of society different organisational forms have been emerging. Society is itself emerging from expectations, communications and interactions. The meaning of expectations is very important as well as the co-ordination of meaning.
• Society is constituted of communications between human beings and what are we communicating? We are communicating expectations and also providing meanings to those expectations. We need a co-ordinating mechanism of those expectations in terms of the codification of communications. An integrated society requires a single hierarchy (e.g., instead of economy and science split).
• I think that the elements we need for our framework could be communications, expectations and meaning.
• We are living in an emerging process and we are in the operational domain of this process but we don't have a linguistic structure in our informational domain rich enough to articulate what is happening to us in the operational domain. The operational domain is your structural coupling in everyday life, and the informational domain is the domain in which you articulate that through a theory in a coherent set of concepts. This is the semantic domain. If I accept this co-evolution of information and communication technologies with social processes in which we do not have a semantic domain, then how do we develop that semantic?
• As cognitive human beings we have the facility to translate things from one paradigm to another paradigm but for that we need a linguistic competence. That has to do with the function of language. Language allows us to communicate at three different levels at the same time; language allows us to exchange information, to provide meaning to that information and to declare an interaction as the result of that information. These are the three questions of Weaver. If you add the Luhmannian perspective you will have a very rich picture, language is the evolutionary achievement of human kind and language allows us to have this option to change our perspective.
• How do we use this theoretical tool that we have in order to know this new way of understanding society? 
• What are the minimum points that we all have to agree to develop this idea further in terms of society? Are those questions a useful way forward?
• Yes I think they are but we have to take into account that Luhmann is only interested in the processing of meanings and not in processing uncertainty whereas in language we have both dimensions, we can process uncertainty and process the meaning and even we can also relate each other in making meaning for the information. That makes one step more complex that Luhmann. I think we need more, we need symbolically mediated communication and that's precisely when the language begins to differentiate into more complex forms of co-ordination. So if language has the co-ordination mechanism we expect a high culture because everything is organised within one dimension, in one co-ordination mechanism. As soon as we have more co-ordination mechanisms we get more hierarchies and we get more functional differentiation spanning up in different dimensions of society. 
• We are talking about co-ordination as a mechanism. This co-ordination is related to the expectations that people have in their interactions. The interaction is the consequence of action. Action can be attributed to an actor but also we can attribute an action to an interaction and then there is a communication. It's like a matrix; the actor having the actions and the distribution is communication. 

CRITICS

• You have set yourselves a vast and complex task. I think that you need to be much more specific in your task.
• I find the notion of 'linguistic structure' very challenging but what is the context? I was just wondering, are you studying Luhmann or are you studying your topic? Perhaps you should focus more on building a story, narrow down your discussion.
• Do we need models and pictures to support linguistic structures?
• I think the notion of 'privileged signifiers' such us speech and language was the prime determinant. Now, however, names can be opened up much more using ICT, for instance with the 'show and tell' approach.

PARTICIPANTS

• The stories we read are not necessarily the same to the stories we tell and with previous technologies the only way for communication that we had was telling stories. Perhaps that is one of the emerging possibilities with ICT, we have now other ways of communicating stories. Nowadays we have other ways of sharing stories and with these sharing of stories we are going to enrich our expectations, enrich our co-ordination and enrich our communication. My question is how can we lead to identify other ways of sharing stories?
• To tell a story we need the intention of co-ordination. In order to tell stories we need intentions behind the roles of co-ordination to create interactions. I have a willing to do something and I have an intention to do something so how can I get co-ordination?
• However, in society and in social systems we don't always act based on your will and your intentions, there are many other things, not just the blind spots, we don't interact responding to intentions and our will. 
• I accept that but, in terms of power, you want to have a better understanding of society so we are creating something or we are describing something. Therefore, in this process, what do we need, only telling stories?
• The values and hierarchical position of people often influence the way they communicate (story telling doesn't exist in a vacuum). The role of power is always there as the sub-text for story telling. There is no single sub-text - there is also a text and a context.
• Textual communication is relatively primitive. But as soon as there are other contexts and symbols available, we move beyond simple communication.
• New technology can challenge the hegemony of text. Text has to be processed sequentially and different codes of communication need to be used. Translations are symmetrical like the relationship between science and economy, science is important for economy and the economy is important for science. All kind of cross-connections can occur between all these media of communication, then the question comes of how is communication reproduced? Then the concept of power comes in. Power is used in two senses, one is in the reproduction of the system and the other is in the sustainability of the system. 
• I think we need to build a distinction between interaction and communication regarding on what forms of stability is structured in society. Some forms of communication won't create society.
• We need a better conceptualisation because we come from a system in which we have a 'privileged text' and the way in which we conceptualise in linked to the any one of these texts. ICT is offering us other ways of articulating concepts. Now we can develop new ways of co-ordinating not necessarily by text. We need to explore these new forms. 
• Luhmann makes the distinction in three levels: Interaction or face-to-face interaction; Organisation, produced by society when creating a hierarchy; and Society is the larger system where the functional differentiation is taking place.

CRITICS

• You really got to be task oriented. What you need is a way of talking about co-evolution of information and communication technology and social processes. This is a very difficult task and I think you are millions of miles away.
• I don't think that they are millions of miles away; they have concentrated very much in communication. I agree entirely that it cannot be text alone because communication is based on connectivity and degrees of connectivity between individuals and this is not a singular relationship; it varies not only with time but with the intensity, the density, the frequency and the quality of the interactions. Therefore we need to also take that into account, that degree of connectivity that affects communication. Now co-evolution, in a social eco-system, takes place through the interactions. It is the interaction that co-evolves not the entities themselves, and therefore by concentrating in communications you are not a million of miles away from going towards exploring what it means to co-evolve within social eco-systems. 
• Another point I would like to make is related to the micro and macro interactions. I would disagree with the point that two people talking do not influence society because it is the interaction of agents, it doesn't matter at what level, that creates the macro structure that emerge. Therefore, 2 people talking can influence society.
• I would like to borrow an expression from Foucault, if we focus in what these information and communication technologists do this is one aspect but the way they do it is another aspect. This leads to another issue; text has universal and local implications.
• Are there any signs of a linguistic structure? Texts are written down and they often get authority because of that whereas stories do not. Text is privileged and ICT can articulate it. Could stories be considered a linguistic structure or not?

PARTICIPANTS 

• We already have a new conceptualisation of the nature of society, social processes and power. For example we have the notion of the nature of society. We have new concepts there the most important one is communication that can be coded and one of the codes is in the form of text, other codes are for example in terms of money, payment, power and law. I think precisely there when the new forms come in by providing communication with new meanings, perhaps you can say that that has to be done through text, because text is privileged in an high culture, the book is privileged, the Bible is privileged. But in a functionally differentiated culture text is not privileged, or money is not privileged or whatever you want to, it depends on what perspective you have.
• Perhaps the point here is that we have always had systems in which you have to privilege something that would be imposed, perhaps the new thing we are trying to find is that you can have different meanings, concepts, we have a way in which they are equally accepted.
• But they are not equal, they are fundamentally different because they are functionally differentiated so in translation dynamics they are asymmetrical, it is not easy to get a common denominator. We have for example money, which is very different from power or from text, and of course we can translate them, we can also use text through a lawyer to make an economic transaction but it is not functional because it is functionally better to do it with money. All these are different perspectives, but if you take a perspective you generate a blind spot, you give them a specific meaning and from that perspective this meaning has a privilege. For example any economist can explain to you that the market is controlling our system and politicians think that the priority is politics, and scientist will say that science is controlling our system; every system and sub-system is controlling according to their own idea of controlling.