What Society? Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society

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Abstract

The essay provides a concise introduction to the epistemological structure of Luhmann’s systems theory and offers a primer to evaluate the conceptual tools it develops to address the problem of how meaning is integrated in a society that is increasingly more complex, and whose complexity is increasingly processed through digital communication. In the modern, functional society described by Luhmann self-reference as a systemic device for maximizing environmental control by maximizing systemic distinctions depends on a communicational structure based on the difference between information, utterance and understanding. But when communication – i.e. society – becomes thoroughly digital, those very “modern” structures of integration seem ineffectual, if not altogether obsolete, to process the difference between utterance/information, because they function within a scale of complexity processing (understanding) that is irreducible to the scale of knowledge generated in the era of the digital media.
Lingua originaleInglese
pagine (da-a)133-148
Numero di pagine16
RivistaSYMPLOKE
Volume28
Numero di pubblicazione(1-2)
DOI
Stato di pubblicazionePubblicato - 2020

Keywords

  • Communication
  • Niklas Luhmann
  • media

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