[Air-l] sociocybernetic media studies

[jespert]

Dear All!

I have just returned home from the 5th international conference of 
sociocybernetics in Lisbon. It was a very successful conference 
academically, socially and culturally  here I will comment on the 
academic part and only on papers with regard to media studies using 
Luhmann. I do this to inform you about the existence of a field of media 
studies that I suppose that only few of you are familiar with  for 
example did I not have my paper accepted to the AIR-conference because 
the reviewers obviously did not understand it. All the papers will 
appear on the ISA RC 51 homepage in the future.

The papers will be described in random order:

Rudi Laermans, had a paper called: 
Media, Morality and Contemporary 
World Society: A Critical Appraisal of Niklas Luhmanns Systems 
Theoretical View
. It gives a knowledgeable resume of Luhmanns theory of 
Mass Media. Rudi is critical regarding Luhmanns claim that the code of 
Mass Media is information /non-information and put forward the idea that 
the code could be attention and non-attention. Another idea is that 
Luhmanns clime, that Mass Media screen out the usual or the everyday 
should be nuanced in spied of the so-called reality television, which in 
most cases is 
daily life television
.

Juan Miguel Aguado builds on Luhmann in his presentation: 
Mass Media, 
Spectacle and Modernity: From Meta-Experiential Narratives to Artificial 
Input Environments
 The paper argues that the media system introduces 
both experience and identity into market dynamics. On the basis of their 
functional segmentation from both technology and economy, mass media 
emerge as a social subsystem that operates uncertainty absorption by 
means of transforming individual and social experiential frames into 
meta-experiences. The media system implements the interest/non interest 
organizational code that specifically involves the re-entry of the code 
in both actor systems and social systems (the former, in terms of 
experiential events as interactions; the latter, in terms of commercial 
events as interactions). The communication pattern emerging from such 
transformation can be outlined under the concept of spectacle, which 
Miguel elaborates on.

Søren Brier had some interesting remarks with reference to Luhmanns 
theory on Mass Media in his presentation: 
Ficta: The New Scientific 
Novel
. Søren said that 
Ficta
 which he defines as a new mode or type 
of science popularisation e.g. the works of Michael Crichton and Greg 
Egan. In a societal perspective this is one out of many examples on how 
we as scientist has to find new ways to communicate to fit in to the 
framework set by the mass media under pressure from politicians.

Giulia Caramaschi presented a paper called: 
Observing The Digital 
Divide: Technological Communication and the Semantics of World-Society
. 
The paper claims that definitions of 
Information Society
 and 
Digital 
Divide
 can be considered as guidelines that society adopts to observe 
it self and direct its operations recursively. The Digital Divide, is 
seen as building at a semantic level, and becomes a parameter through 
which society describes its boundaries: access or non-access to 
technology outlines the criteria of inclusion and exclusion qualifying 
the structure of society.

Vessela Misheva presented a paper called: 
The Social Function of the 
System of The Mass Media
. Vessela claims that Mass Media as described 
by Luhmann cannot be seen as a function system! The reason is that 
unlike all other systems, which have institutionalized permanent social 
roles that presuppose uninterrupted and continuous production processes, 
the system of the mass media has institutionalized what Goffman termed 

a discrepant social role.
 According to Vessela, in principle, 
discrepant social roles cannot support the emergence of an entirely new 
social system. The latter becomes possible only when the discrepant role 
becomes modified and is transformed into a permanent role. Vessela put 
forward the idea that an additional social role can be assigned to the 
mass media, namely, that of 
conflict-management.


Michael Paetau presented a paper called: 
Information Technology and The 
Long-Term Memory of Society
. This paper asks: How it is possible to 
make knowledge which is generated in separate contexts, in specific 
localities, and bound to specific actors, available to the system as a 
whole? And analyses successful transformation of knowledge as coupled to 
three conditions: first, to a condensation of social experience and its 
decontextualized sedimentation in a suitable storage media; second, to 
the effective transfer of this sediment respecting factual, spatial, 
temporal, and social aspects; third, to the (re-)actualization of the 
knowledge sediments in practical problem-solving situations, which 
commonly differ from the original knowledge generation context.

My own presentation (Jesper Taekke) was called: 
Usenet Newsgroups as 
Mediated Communication Systems
 But was mostly in the oral presentation 
about the theory that I am building on: 
The Media Sociography
 My claim 
is that we can build on Luhmann regarding media studies but that we when 
talking about technical media must integrate the so called Toronto 
school (Innis, McLuhan, Ong, Eisenstein, Meyrowitz etc.) in the analysis 
 and I presented a possible framework to do that.


Best Regards
Jesper

-- 
Jesper Tække - MA. Ph.D.-Student - IT University of Copenhagen - Dept. of Digital Aesthetics & Communication -  Glentevej 67 - DK-2400 NV Copenhagen NW - Phone +45 3816 8888 - Direct +45 3816 8881 - Fax +45 3816 8899 - http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/  - e-mail: jespert at it-c.dk