Re: Social Information

ON THE NATURE OF SOCIAL INFORMATION

If information is the measure of reduced uncertainty an observer has about
the world, then social information is the measure of a society*s reduced
uncertainty. I know several of you will be uncomfortable with that because
you are convinced that only humans can be observers. But I think
observation is simply interaction, and interaction can take place between
every kind of element and system, provided there is an energy gradient
available. There is a record or trace left of an interaction, however,
only when some structure can be noticeably changed as a result of a flow
across a frontier. The record of an interaction, which provides a kind of
*map* of the observed, is the alterations in internal components and
relationships defining the observing structure. When the structures
associated with information are living systems, if not exclusively human
beings, neural networks or similar brain-related tissues are altered.
These material media store memories about encounters between organisms and
their worlds.

Societies also store memories, but not always in material media. There are
material records, of course, in the forms of tools, art works, and
documents. But societies also store information in rituals and rites,
social roles and institutions, languages and myths. Recording interactions
with the world in, e.g., social roles means that it is changed human
behaviors which store social information. Of course, humans can change
their behaviors individually, spontaneously, and for their own private
reasons. But if we imagine spontaneously changing individuals in
isolation, then it is clear the record of these changes can be stored in
their separate brains and bodies. However, if these individuals are
members of societies, then their behavioral variations may affect how*and
even whether*others live. The records of these actions will then be stored
in external systems, like symbol systems and organized group behaviors.
The recording media change because it is information about the groups, not
the individuals in them, which now to has be stored.

The existence of these records indicates that information about social
collectives is qualitatively different from the biological information
stored in genes and tissues. Collectives are not always easy to perceive,
especially if you are burdened with an Anglo-American sensibility. But it
takes only a moment to appreciate how societies could self-organize, on the
one hand, and have effects on the world and their components which
permanently transform both. If that is so, then the structure of a
self-organized society is itself the embodiment of social information, for
the social structure remembers, through replicated rituals and rites, roles
and institutions, languages and myths, how much the group*s uncertainty
about a transformed environment was reduced.

Societies self-organize when the number of human interactions pass a
threshold and, suddenly, become interconnected wholes greater than the sum
of their parts. This is not mystical, for if synergies between people
release energy into an environment which has effects disproportional to its
causes, feedback from the environment *selects* the whole. Although
generated bottom-up by interacting people, once organized societies have
top-down effects on their constituents. The whole sustains itself by
recording what it, the society, knows about the world. That cannot be done
in the brains and bodies of people, for then we would have lots of
information about yous and mes but no information about the us shared in
common. The most obvious example is the invention of agriculture, which
released energies able to sustain an exploding population that was trapped,
ever after, in the Iron Cage of its own making. For an expanded population
could not survive by following its biological injunctions*it survived by
sustaining the agricultural system.

For agricultural systems to survive it was necessary to communicate
messages to all of their members describing how they must restrict the
number of possible behaviors available to them biologically*fight, flight,
mate, sleep, eat, etc*in favor of a circumscribed set of behaviors. The
latter is essential because it is only by practicing selected behaviors
that the social network on which all depend is reconstituted. Only if
people counted on to dig ditches, say, did so regardless of how tired they
were or of how little return they got on their labor could those who
ploughed fields expect to have the water needed to ripen crops, which
soldiers, scribes, and artisans needed to perform the tasks on which ditch
diggers depended.

It is important to realize that there is nothing in our biology that
requires digging ditches, say, and little in the outcomes of early
civilizations to seduce people into such endless labor. People performed
these jobs because their societies obliged or forced them to, which is why
Spencer called early forms of correlated human behaviors *coercive
cooperation.* Being restricted to a narrow set of externally determined
behaviors by the whole to which a person belongs is playing a *social
role.* Social roles record what societies know about collective
environments.

People learn how to play social roles as members of societies, by
assimilating the information stored in their structures. Social roles are
communicated to people, in the first instance, by reenactments of
successful collective enterprises, typically dances or games, which, over
time, become rituals and rites. Once the behaviors appropriate to a social
role become clear, however, they could be institutionalized by blows and
shouts. Blows and shouts are not subtle means of communicating but they
can be effective, especially if people could be locked into particular
behaviors and, thereafter, simply required to repeat them. Simple social
systems self-organized in stable and benign environments survived by
confining people to rigidly prescribed behaviors for long periods of time.

But if individuals varied their behavior they sometime found more effective
ways to exploit nature, and the increased flow of resources would have
required more specialized roles and more intimate relations to process.
(Environmental changes can have similar effects, of course.) Processing
increased flows by telling generations upon generations to perform the same
tasks would no longer be adequate, for there would be new tasks to perform
and many different ways to perform them. Thus, more, and more complex,
messages would have to be sent. People might have to be taught to alter
their social roles or at least to vary some of their outputs as
circumstances changed. Sending more messages and more complex ones
required developing new media for communicating. Rather than telling
people exactly what to do, societies needed to equip them with the ability
to figure out not only what role to play but which variant of the role
applied, how intensely to apply it, etc. Then people could guide
themselves*and still sustain the interacting network on which all depended.
To communicate information about complex actions, repeating messages was
not enough. New forms of redundancy were required.

For people to guide themselves they needed to anticipate how the collective
environment would respond to structural alterations in a society caused by
varied individual behaviors. Anticipations require the use of mental
models, which in this case would be views of the social wholes to which
individuals belonged. Typically, it is an axiom of systems theory that
while wholes can observe parts, parts cannot observe wholes. So providing
a god*s-eye view was not easy. But when Values, Ethics, and Morals (VEMs)
emerged a device was at hand. VEMs symbolically represented morally
significant end-states and provided rules for arriving at*or avoiding*them.
Pursuing those states according to the prescribed rules leads individuals
to judge their own actions and make meaningful choices between options.
VEMs are symbolic representations of the roles members of societies play,
which roles themselves are behavioral representations of the worlds
societies create.

Maps of the behaviors that map the world, VEMs are quintessential social
information. Because they are not records of personal experiences, which
can be communicated in terms of sensations of pleasure and pain, VEMs are
new kinds of information. The knowledge of good and evil, VEMs symbolize
what actions *mean* and then harness sensations of pleasure and pain in the
pursuit of socially beneficial behaviors. VEMs only emerge after the phase
change from nomadic scavengers to sedantic farmers takes place, after a
context in which individual actions have collective effects self-organizes.
The context, of course, is the social whole, and actions which tend to
sustain it are *good* while those tending to destabilize it are *bad.*

VEMs make the evolution of more complex societies possible because they
contextualize messages. Messages which contextualize information are much
more dependable, for they give receivers clues on how to decode them and
thus increase the probabilities that the sender*s intention will be
achieved. When communication systems improve, social systems can access
many more states, process different kinds of flows, and make more efficient
use of resources. But securing messages depends on providing individual
decision makers with the ability to, imaginatively, rise above their
station and view the social whole. Thus, VEMs are metaphorical periscopes
recording the reduced uncertainty societies have about their
environments*which uncertainty VEMs keep to a minimum by constraining
human behaviors. This kind of information also helps people reduce their
uncertainty about each other and themselves.

VEMs demonstrate that social information exists, is a measure of reduced
uncertainty, and has no agency. Social information should not be reified
and does not DO anything. But it does record the emergence of new
observers*social systems rather than biological, chemical, or physical
ones...

Bob Artigiani
Received on Thu Sep 24 11:18:38 1998