Re: Social Information, New media

From: Gottfried Stockinger <[email protected]>
Date: Wed 28 Oct 1998 - 17:24:18 CET

Bob wrote:
>Now it is unlikely that rites and rituals*or bonded behaviors*can map a
great number of social environments or adapt as those environments change.
Yet because collective actions have pushed nature farther from equilibrium
by creating the environment in which the society is embedded, it becomes
ever more likely that any deviation in individual choices could trigger
nonlinear reactions with profound effects upon the social whole. It is, of
course, just as likely that any variation in the environment will trigger
similarly nonlinear reactions by the society, since the environment itself
has been driven far from equilibrium. Either situation leads directly to
circumstances in which the dynamic stability of society and environment
reaches a crisis or bifurcation point.<

[Gottfried]
I agree that rites are too "heavy" to support fast change in a for from
equilibrium state. They are part of the non-equilibrium, they are boosting!
(As we
can see nowadays). So, what to do with them in a situation where the
likelyhood of instability and nonlinear reactions is increasing enourmosly?
We know that social information processes are irreversible, we can not go
back to the "good old times", where there has still been "morality" and
respect of tradtional rites and behaviours.

>So for social systems to endure they must be able to adapt quickly to
changing circumstances. However, adaptation means they will have to reduce
uncertainty about parts of the world never before experienced. Storing new
information may lead to the invention of new media, some of which may be
more effective than rites, rituals and force. Technologies and arts, for
instance, store information*and it may be that the earliest arts are
descriptions of how to locate and exploit resources upon which the
collective depends. <

You got the point: rituals, force etc. do not do their "job" any more. They
are now unable to reduce uncertainty. Or, still "worse", they increase
uncertainty as they themselfes are not certain any more. So we have to
look, as you say, for new media. That can only be, IMO, a media made out of
a non-rites and non-force kind. A media that (like art and tecnology, as
you mention) helps social creativity to come out to wipe off the "unfit"
VEMs and roles of the past which have lead to war,
environtmental destruction and misery, globally.

>In any case, the most effective ways to store and communicate social
information use language. Legends and myths, for example, can tell stories
about ancestral actions and describe results in ways that will encourage
succeeding generations to mimic those behaviors in pursuit of expected
results. You can tell stories faster than you can act out rituals, or
force slaves to embody actions. <

No, no, legends and myths are still part of rites and rituals, which, as
you already said, and I second, are not sufficiently fit to accompaign or
stabilize todays
dynamics of social change.

>But if language could map relationships, the capacity of a social system
to store and communicate information would be vastly increased. <

I think the term "language" is a little bit too "narrow".
Language is still associated with story-telling and convincing somebody by
force of eloquency, isnt it?
I think you may agree because you say:
>It would no longer be necessary to tell individuals exactly what they
should do, which would limit collective possibilities to a small number of
known options. Individuals could determine their own actions, for they
would be able to see the relationships they are in and deduce the behaviors
appropriate to those relationships. This distribution of decision making
authority, combined with the possibility that individuals could
spontaneously adjust their actions to those of others, would immensely
increase the flexibility of the social system*it could preserve its order
even as it moved from one environmentally adaptive state to another.<

So, instead of claiming language to substitute VEMs, roles, rites etc., why
dont we speak of "communication", in a broader sense, exchange of
information. Doing so, we can move from an individual-centered sociological
paradigm (based on VEM-controlled personal behaviours) to a
communication-act centered one (based on informationally guided collective
behaviour, providing the necessary flexibility and other features you
related above.

>When language maps meaning*when it symbolizes how actions affect systems*a
new medium for storing social information has emerged.<

When COMMUNICATION maps meaning.... would be more certain, IMO.

>This new medium is the VEMs characteristic of a particular society. There
must be some threshold of population size, density, and distribution beyond
which VEMs emerge, but I do not know what it is. Suffice it to say the
emergence of VEMs marks the evolution of complex social systems. This
makes logical sense because one definition of complex systems is that they
have models of themselves, which is what VEMs are in terms of social
information.<

You are returning to the past, still. If VEMs would have had or provided a
model of complex society itself, if they really would have stored the
information necessary for social change, we would not need to surch for new
media. The problem, yet, is that VEMs have just worked for small dominant
groups ("high society") in order to control and repress mass-consciousness.
What we need now to explain in sociology is how collective consciouness can
work without beeing controled by overcome VEMs.
Look, new media is not equal to new VEMs. Media is communication between
parts throug the whole (global culture, spirit of humanity, name it as you
like). VEMs, as you already stated, dont have the necessary flexibility.

>All societies have the same goal of preserving organization in a far from
equilibrium environment. Yet every society has different VEMs. VEMs
differ from society to society because VEMs are the peculiar symbols which
are able to excite individuals to choose behaviors forming a non-average
set of possibilities. <

IMO, there do not exist "societies" (plural), at the level of an
information (communication)-guided sociological theory. We live in one
world and communicate in a global cultural layout (as we do on this list,
dont we?). Even if we would stick to the explanation of different VEMs in
different world regions, what would we explain. Only the past, the wars,
the old repressing order. Lets historians do that better. There would be
almost no outcome for explaining how to dissolve traditional VEMs to start
a global communication on our way to information society (singular).

>Since the society is not REPRODUCING but is REPLICATING, the analogy
between VEMs and DNA looks proper. DNA replicates an organism by mapping
the molecular activities and chemicals forming particular cells.
Analogously, VEMs map choices leading to behaviors replicating social
systems.<

I think, here we have to hear what Morris posted about (we both have not
been very right yet):
[Morris, previous]
>An important difference is that gene type fitness is correlated with
Darwinian natural selection pressures. But social fitness is not Darwinian,
instead it seems Lamarkian! One thing is slow, long term, a priori
evolution
and another is immediate, fast changing, experiential dynamics which are
shared
above and beyond genetic information. Importantly, Lamarkian dynamics also
leaves room for reversibility (which I think is an important element in
VEMS and has been mentioned by Stockinger and Ebeling).<

If we want to explain traditional social order, you are right: VEMs in
analogy to DNA.
But if we want to explain the radical changements ongoing in this former
traditional order, darwinian slow-change explanations do not fit any more.
If I remember well (maybe Morris can help us more), Lamarkian evolution
goes beyond DNA-driven genetics.

>People must be taught how to act to replicate a social system, and it is
their socially scripted behaviors that are the *stuff* of societies.<

People have been taught, and the result is now a society out of
equilibrium. You got it already in your above statements. So if "scripted"
(controlled) behaviour is the stuff of societies, than "goodbye poor
world"! Fortunaltely, it is not. Society is made of a more "sensitive"
stuff: information and its communication.

>Like VEMs, social roles vary from society to society. There is,
therefore, a population of societies, which will successfully replicate for
greater or lesser periods of time. Those which replicate roles on the
basis of humanistic VEMs, I think, tend to adapt and survive better. They
are more fit because their members have greater autonomy.<

All our civilization is based on humanistics: order, progesss, libert�,
egalit�, fraternit�, christion values and so on. All of these general
values have been used to control behaviour for particular use. There was no
"greater autonomy" because of this VEMs.

Kindly

Gottfried Stockinger

Vienna, Austria
Tel *43-1- 983 39 79
or
Belem, Brazil
Tel:*55 -91- 225 2140
Received on Wed Oct 28 15:29:13 1998

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