Meeting 3 Notes

Co-ordinator = Rebecca Herron

PARTICIPANTS

• How are more complex organisational forms being created from interactions? I think that it is fruitful to follow Luhmann in distinguishing at least three levels of interactions. 
  1. Concrete interaction level, which is the basic format. 
  2. Organisation level, when some density of communication can be developed into an organisation, which can be stabilised perhaps overtime. So the interaction between human beings are expected not to be equally distributed, some places maybe more dense. Some of the densities are possible to be stabilised in some for of organisation and some of these organisational forms can be selected for globalisation. 
  3. Then we get society, functions at the level of society, functions of the social system. For example the economic transaction between people, then at some places and cities markets are formed which are a specific organisational form for exchange processes, then this is globalised to produce a market. That is the model and this is, of course, debatable whether a good model or not.
• I think my problem is not that Luhmann understands the society, but how the people understand the society. How we move from there. When I suggested the possibility of talking about story the sense was that when people observe them they can observe in the level of their interactions and they can observe themselves even in society. They have some distinctions here that would help them to understand. The interesting thing about ICT is not that all of us are aware of the situation whether we make Luhmann distinctions or not but that we have ways in which many people could begin to understand.
• It might be useful to see if we can understand something at the level in which society forms, perhaps by looking at very simple models.
• How can we use ICT to design this kind of models or tools?
• If you are saying that society comes out of communication between two people, there we have a very simple situation a very simple structure.
• ICT is very helpful on having different forms and texts in order to see communication processes because until now, when we wanted to understand society, we have to do it usually through texts, someone writes or reads the texts. But I think that ICT would help to show varieties of ways of showing and telling. I am not going to dispute whether communication means expectations, co-ordination of actions or whatever. I can, instead of describing it through a rich text, make a film that perhaps would be richer and helpful to the people to understand it. 
• But you are using ICT as a tool and my question is if we need to design something.
• I think you need to design on ICT ways of interaction. These things do not happen just by having the mechanical hardware and the software. How are we going to interact so that we are decoding it all the time?
• If we accept the distinction between self-organising society, organisation and interaction, I think that if we want to design something to have an impact on social systems we cannot do it at the level of self-organising society because it is beyond control. On the other hand, if we do that at the level of the interaction between two stories, that is not sufficient either because it does not have the element of organisation to it. Therefore, we have to be in between that. What we have to organise is, in my opinion, different storylines and different discourses. 
• I am not sure whether I would agree about not being able to do it at the individual level because one of the ideas behind evolving systems is that if you change something in the way an individual work, it could speed up and change the structure.
• So, we can use ICT for observing different discourses, it can give us other tools for showing things different than texts. 
• I don't think this is just ICT, I think that we need just to move from textual discourse, which tries to stabilise the geometrical metaphor, towards a more algorithmic modelling, which means that we include more dimensionality in the story that we tell. I am just making aware that these possibilities are available. In this stage of social and cultural evolution we have the means to incorporate this type of complexity into our communication. 
• We got two things here, on the one hand we agreed that communication is important so we can use ICT to develop that richness of communication, on the other hand we have the question of how could we use ICT to understand the society. They appear to be different things weaving around.

CRITICS

• I think the discourse of truth is only a small part of what is going on. I am nervous about using the normal science model because I don't accept that as a good model for society. I would like to hear from this group something about the opening up of new (wider) possibilities and insights to understand society.
• You seem to be revisiting a lot of the previous discussions and my suggestion might be to look at the outcome resolve of the last meeting and perhaps you start focusing on what are you going to be doing next.
• I think that you have a task here to produce something that is understandable to a normal person and which is actually useful for the process of co-evolution.
• What I have understood from you is you want to understand society, you want to understand communication you want to understand ICT, two questions I want to mention, how to organise ICT how to use ICT so I am not sure what you precisely want to understand and obviously not only about understanding but also about to have a tool through which more people can understand something but I don't know what yet. There is a difference in what you want to understand and difference in end product, or where you want to go and may design a way forward.

PARTICIPANTS

• I think it is very important to make a distinction between a co-ordination at the level of society and the co-ordination at the level of reflection because they can be in different functional modes. I am interested in how we co-ordinate different understandings of society functions. I think the answer here is that, of course, you can discard the discourse of truth. I think that we are puzzled by the fact that science has formed part of different disciplines and discourses, and each has a discourse of truth. How do we co-ordinate those different semantics?
• We may not come to a closure at this point but can we understand more about society by considering the interaction and communication between individuals, taking individuals as agents looking at different values, and observing them at different levels? I will be interested to know whether we can use that to get more information about society and may be using some games as a methodological tool. 
• If you want to do what we have now asked to do by the critics, I think this is quite easy. We take a recipe from the previous meeting and we say that we all decide to put our different storylines together and to organise that into a coherent framework over the next half year.