Niklas Luhmann: Function, Code, and Ontology of the Media
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- Опубліковано 11 жов 2023
- Media and philosophy, part 9. It might be a bit complicated.
#NiklasLuhmann #media #philosophy
Media theory series:
• Walter Benjamin: The F...
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Source:
German version, the page number in the video correspond to this version of the book: books.google.com/books/about/...
English version--"The Reality of the Mass Media":
www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1302
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Outro Music:
Carsick Cars - You Can Listen You Can Talk:
• Carsick Cars - You Can...
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Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, author of "The Radical Luhmann" and "Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems"
(If you buy professor's book from the Columbia University Press website and use the promo code CUP20 , you should get a 20% discount.)
cup.columbia.edu/book/the-radi...
Thanks to Nemo Li for helping with the Chinese subtitles!
This comment is designed to motivate polite and well argumented discussion on the current video's topic, however it has been disguised as if written by a troll to maximize engagement.
I've always thought that social media platforms are terrible centers of discourse disguised as wonderful centers. Connecting is easier, but so his hiding. I feel you and I are connected with a shared sentiment and love for society, but it will never be more than a vague misty relationship in the UA-cam comments. I've never met you, don't even know if you're real, really.
All of these realities appear within a single contiguous moment of actuality, which is also the ground of the phaenomena from which these realities arise. If taken literally, this comment just adds another layer of reality, in which some static thing called 'actuality' both causes and contains other static things called 'realities'. If, however, read as intended, it is merely a linguistic pointer to a felt experience that may never be truly captured by any conceptual description of any reality. This indescribable, fundamental or "transcendental" encounter is what I called 'actuality' above, since it does not consist of things (like reality) but is a continuous flow of action (see Heraclitus)
@@tylermilsop YT is like a hyena in controlling interaction of simple users, when they think the topic is sensitive to oligarchy.
Such media debates are especially vulnerable to censorship. Self-protection by and of the evil players.
😂 Exactly!
Excellent episode. Carefree Wandering is some of the best philosophy on UA-cam.
As always clear and thought provoking. We are so lucky to have such high level content, even with the declared caveat of it being on the mass media. Looking forward to the next video.
This series has been so good especially the culminating sub-series on Luhmann
I've been waiting for this video. Got so hooked on the last one that I started reading Luhmann and you guys were not kidding about his clarity, or lack of.
Thank you!
keep going!
I find that Luhmann writes pretty clear and think that's it's kind of a myth that he'd be unreadable. Maybe people don't have good enough understanding of his concepts.
Probably my favourite channel on UA-cam... Perfect as always.
This guy is brilliant
If I am understanding the point about information and non-information correctly, I feel like I have often experienced this in the past in the emotional context of being exhausted and annoyed by news programs which repeat, with slight variance, the same "big story" throughout their daily broadcast. This is one of the reasons why I rarely engage with news sites and never watch news on the TV: these are organizations largely oriented around the enforcement of non-information which you are encouraged to think is highly important because of how it is relayed via informational/visual bombardment.
Thanks God or UA-cam for this channel after searching for Chomski recent interviews. Your second level observations are really inspiring these times
Excellent stuff! A good balance of useful academic terminology in context with plenty of plain speech to inform a layman's understanding of valuable perspective
He opens with a pretty egregious strawman. Looks like it is in vogue now to evoke Chomsky, strawman his work, and then "dismantle" it. Douglas Lain over at Sublation Media did it two weeks ago.
This one felt definitely a lot more actually like a lecture, very complex
I say it again, “Ideology today functions primarily through the mediation of resentment.”
This is so brilliant, I feel like I've been lookin for this idea for ten years ...media irritates. That's it
Great information as always here. Maybe the reason so-called "conspiracy theories" are so popular in our society is because they are a natural reaction to the irritant of media. The conspiracy theory is a kind of societal scar tissue that results from the wound of intrusive messaging. These "theories" serve not just to explain the world, but to deflect any need to evaluate all incoming information equally, or even on its own terms.
You should go read the book by Chomsky he strawmans the sh¡t out of, the Propaganda Model of the mass media does not encourage deflection, THIS video does that. It STARTS with a dismissal of criticizing power in favor of interpreting/integrating with it. THAT is fatalism. This reflexive acceptance of the acts and desires of the powerful, and how to accept, or "contextualize,"or "understand" or "evaluate" or whatever other idiotic thing we could do OTHER than confront it.
A person who can afford to "evaluate" the obvious forever is a person living well on the surplus provided to them by the system they are "contemplating."
Like, we can "*think about*" what to do about the Israel Palestine conflict, or we can demand the US Government stop perpetuating it, as they have successfully done for 50 years. Maybe we can split the difference and "pray about it."
Oh, I know, we can "watch the news," and then "know that they are lying to us because it's so, so obvious," and then we can read a book on philosophy to make us feel better about the fact that we are spineless grifters, cooking up excusses for our government's behavior while it spoon feeds us little bites of what it steals.
@@CapnSnackbeard I found this also with Luhmann, who seemed to care about not irritating the powers that be. Is it a German syndrone?
A guy who was much bolder, was Heinz von Foerster.
@@neovxr I can't say I'm shocked. I generally like this channel, but this video was pretty disappointing. It is ALL lefty philosophy right now. As we move closer to needing to take action, I think the mind of the philosopher despairs. We are leaving behind his realm, the world of thinking. What else is philosophy for if not to learn to accept that which can't be changed? They become a post ex facto spokesperson for "how it is." They say "well, it may suck, but don't worry, I will explain why it sucks!" It seems to turn life into a kind of a spectator's sport.
Was already a fan of this channel and this series; and now, after seeing Mr. Moeller has a copy of BLAME! on his shelf, I am sold!
This is fantastic! I would definitely watch if you made another video looking more broadly at his systems theory!!
Carsick Cars at the end gets me every time. ❤
Great video as always. Very informative and clear explanation. Thank you!
Thanks for this video. Interesting contrast you made between structure of modern mass media and religion.
I'm Muslim and pray gives me comfort even if it's centuries old but media constantly produce narratives to sell and stay relevant
Thanks for the videos, haven't heard of Luhmann and you really hook me up or however it is said. Subscribed!
Can't wait for the final episode already! Would be great if you could talk about Social Media/Citizen Journalism/Twitter, Billionaires/corporates owning mass media in our you analysis.
i'm always impressed by this content. thanks!
There's so many comments like this one on youtube, but trust I mean it. Thank you!
Thanks for another great Luhmann video. This has me wondering if we are seeing the birth of an distinct AI social system that could emerge as autonomous AI agents are created that use large language models to communicate, reproduce information, and form subsystems. In a recent paper, researchers created a virtual game development company, assigning roles to agents that talked to each other with an LLM. They worked collaboratively to create a simple game and its documentation. I wonder what Luhmann would have thought of autonomous AI agents communicating with each other to accomplish a goal using a statistical model based on human communication.
Definitely gonna watch this👌. Hey hans, you make great interesting videos about multiple perspectives which could increase our sensmaking and understanding thank you for that! Can you maybe make a video about alan watts or manly p hall? That would be awesome. Keep up the great work!
Beautifully explained!
05:58 Irritation
09:35 Time
20:15
Very cool! Thanks.
that was absolutely mind blowing. Since you are moving back to strict media, what is the best next steps to getting into the more general theory of luhmann? a specific book or other resource?
Luhmann is not alone.
Looking up everything Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana might be very enlightening as well. I think they are even bolder.
3:00 cool pick!
Fantastic video! thank you
There are two levels of knowledge:
1. coming from the outside, like mass media and educational media
2. anecdotal, ie. personal experience, what we see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and how we interact directly with others, and the results of that.
Unfortunately, the total priority and higher level of the personal experience is not acknowledged enough, which leads to more bitter failures, like the current wars.
Mass media attempt to jump in for the combinatory explosion that not everyone can negotiate a reality with everyone. But this is very limited.
Luhmann seems to avoid the factor of ultimate power, that everyone who is important seems to crave for, in democracies even more so.
ty for doing this💚
"I'm specifically saying there ARE NOT people in smoke filled rooms pulling strings. But that doesn't compute. So Wolfe, or whoever, hears me saying there IS a smoke filled room with people pulling strings." Chomsky
We take in the second order observations (known to be known), we also can use our ability to derive a general-other (an abstraction between what we know to be known and what is radically othered from us by sheer virtue of ignorance and misremembering) from significant otherness (alterity) to allow us to draw from first order observations when we view second order observations in media, because ppl have always been aware of this split even if it weren't documented and made me obvious in sensational physical imagery due to audio-visual media, bc the disjoint (but not total disconnect) between general otherness & more intimate familiarity is something established by mirror neurons and spindle neurons during any real or imagined social interaction, including the viewing of this exaggeratedly second-order frame made global by mass media.
it's a lot more in our face now in direct "content" packages that mimic "actually being there", yet ppl can indeed see their relational frame while looking at someone else's, though it's sloppy (so i agree it's not transcendental to negotiate the frame of second order observation & one's own first order frame of observation) then what we're left with is people in general always resist this sensational media environment by chopping it down to a bubble and trying to live in bubbles of various sizes and hopping around, i see mass media as the entrusted oral-storyteller roles (advisor, fool, "elder" in the sense of sage, messenger, etc) given excessive vibrance due to technology's ability to mimic moving photorealistic sensory imagery with synchronized sound.
I'm splitting hairs, but i see an analogy and repetition of older themes separated by technological environment (medium, media) but the achievement of mass media for better or for worse is the ability to vividly encode the medium itself as the message, when in my earlier example of oral delivery (and written message to another degree) the messenger was showing their presence as the medium of communication as they delivered the information.
maybe it's naive, but i usually err on the side of most people adapting their frames of reference enough to eventually see through to the difference between media and intermediary (my understanding of the two layers you summarised, disclosed in presentation & communication).
This isn't to disagree with the main thing you said about coding for information/non-info and establishing a sort of illusory "global consensus" that ppl know on some level is partial (thus the scare quotes around 'global') is not a unique indicator of a ontological universality.
my addition is that ppl see through it bc we can simultaneously see the frame of the observers we're observing (2nd order) and our own frame of reference (1st order). People have to repress some of each while actually taking in the information, and that does lead to this quasi-suspicion, but we see examples of people negotiating those frames of reference throughout recorded history.
So i basically think ppl are mostly experts of that negotiation in every era, but when we step up to the plate of any given social environment, we drop resolution here and enhance resolution elsewhere (salience) to kind of necessarily forget a more granularly negotiated sense of relation to general other in order to feel connected intimately, which is how advertising is able to repeat itself incessantly yet still overall maintain a prominent role in mediating peoples desires and fears.
I'm going with what could be a platitude if i didn't elaborate it ("History doesn't repeat, it remixes") but i think it holds as a good rule of thumb that people are all social geniuses in ways that can both see through information and decide when to invoke some and temporarily misremember other information in ways that any messenger can manipulate.
i get pulled into an advertisement briefly even if i spent the last few moments disambiguating the bombardment of other ads, for instance.
So i guess maybe my autism diagnosis may be relevant here bc part of what leads to overwhelm for me sometimes is that i do see all these frames of reference and i can't always narrow it down without going too narrow (perseveration). i can't repress second order information while processing first order or vice versa ("social pragmatic communication") but most people do as a rule unless perhaps during psychotic events. So i might be generalising the 'royal We' i kept using in this comment to a "severely autistic We" when in the greater scope of things, most people are more "jacked in" to mass media than i can experience (like how i can't suspend my disbelief for more than a couple times within an episode of something before i just feel disconnected from what's being presented to me).
other than that caveat, even in people who wouldn't qualify for my diagnosis, second order and first order seem to be minimally separated and negotiable during the same moment of communication and same delivery of information.
I wonder how well those two realities of media can be described by Brentano's intentionality but in a more complex way - first, the media's relation to what they inform us about and second, our relation to media doing their informing job. Those two intentionalities have two opposite tendencies: to merge (we "perceive the world" through the media) and to separate (we perceive the media as something "between" us and the world).
There is a start of an answer, in Foerster's conversation with Maturana about "Truth versus Trust". We should talk about the question what has become of that?
We are hoping that our construction of a reality is consistent, and valid for as many other people as possible, right?
Chinese philosophy has a picture about that, that is very wellknown to everyone there: Pointing to a deer and telling that it is a horse.
A man did this to find out who would be loyal to him, and who might become his enemy, if the situation in the social environment becomes more conflicting.
Excellent...in fact, irritatingly excellent.
Have you considered commentating on Vilem Flusser? Into the Universe of Technical Images is excellent.
I think he describes the society as "modern" rather than "postmodern" because he himself is quite postmodern in his approach so everything a postmodern approach notices becomes "modern" by comparison by its position in the endless discourse.
Great video
Hans-Georg Moeller, it's clear you've read Luhmann's ideas intensely. But what about his slip-box methodology?
You as a philosopher, I'm curious what this says about the human mind as a symbolic network of ideas?
Thanks for the video, Luhmann was a great system thinker and was able to break down the symbolic subjective reality humans find themselves in, I think this is why his ideas resonate with me system thinking and symbolic
exploration adds a thick description to life experiences in the human experience spectrum.
So mad men and edward bernays are just simple common people like you and i. Thank you. I sleep better now.
If we think of the media as windows on the world, we may suppose that some of these windows are more transparent and less distorting than others. A perfect window neither adds or subtracts, but it still always frames the world.
But now suppose we have learned that what we thought were windows, are not windows at all, but rather are screens. Now we may wonder if the images we see are faithful representations from a high resolution camera, or if they are wholly construct, or if they are something in between.
Some media systems are more distorting and controlling than others (I presume). Consider a Russian who can only get information from the state meeting. Or an American who chooses to only get information from Media that only tells them the lies they want to believe. Regardless, of where you get your information you generally cannot see the lies that you believe.
How do you maintain that these systems are different when media institutions, including news and entertainment, are often owned as part of business conglomerates, often news media draw all of there academic analysis from think tanks which are also owned by business conglomerates, and even when they don’t, universities are also often either owned by or courses paid for by… business conglomerates. Both indirectly influencing governments which are made from parties who’s primary income is from donations from the wealthy members of these conglomerates. (Conglomerates here is being used indistinguishably for a verity of businesses entities) however I have come to believe that what has distinguished the early 21st century, is the collapse of differentiations between these systems, not formally as in 20th century totalitarianism but as a series of social and material arrangements with the same end.
Could we get some reading guide/list for Luhmann's works?
Find out about the videos with Heinz von Foerster!
Start with his joke about Pavlov and Konorsky.
Knowledge and power have always been conjoined. Real power is usually hidden, force is visible.
In this sense arent descriptions of reality also constructions of background reality and not really describing anything at all? This would turn Luhmanns "how can we describe the reality of their construction of reality" into how can we *construct* the reality of their construction of reality (?) In this context what purpose does describing even do? (Perpetuating media use? Maintaining us within its framework?) Isnt it self defeating in the end, since this just irritates us even more? This is not to say a great rising would "fix" things but where does this take us? I find this confusing (perhaps im irritated lol) and probably one of the videos I most like, wonderful job!
"Communication is the interactive computation of /a/ reality."
(Heinz von Foerster)
"Believed 2B believed." Captain (Long John) Sinclair.
quote at 8:50
sounds very Heidegerrian
Interesting. I have read a few of Luhmann's books but never this one. Listening to your presentation of it makes me think, he might have not been very precise in the application of his theory. Treating advertising and movies as instances of mass-media-communication (application of the code), is not convincing to me. As you nicely emphasize, there is an important distinction between the distribution infrastructure and the code-lead communication. So, it is possible to say that organizations that self-describe as "media", "publishing" or "news" do not use the distribution infrastructure solely for "information" in the code sense, but also publish advertising - which is best understood as primarily enticing economic communication (make people buy stuff). (Although to which system(s) an operation "belongs" is determined by the subsequent communication event chains.)
Ads (and some aren't ignored by me or you) end up in very similar ways, "irritating" us, because they are about important or innovative products what might gain big influence, like the success of a certain brand of e-car.
To Luhmann, being German might have had some chilling influence in these thoughts. Heinz von Foerster sometimes to me makes him look very soft. Foerster came from Vienna, went to Berlin, got in trouble because of the signs of the times, and soon became a super famous systemics guy in the US, main stay at university of Illinois.
@@neovxr Don't really know what you mean by soft/hard. Care to elaborate?
Yes, there is something about the hunt for novelty in modern (market) economics that seems to point to a connection between media and consumerism. What I don't find plausible is to treat the media system (the social system) as the driver of the acceleration. That notion seems to me to rest on a conflation of the communication technology (an external condition of communication) with the media system as a social system. Our current technologies enable faster and de-localized communication processing for ALL of the functional systems, among those the media system.
"Irritation" within systems theory is referring to interactions between systems, which cannot steer each other but rather do provide instances ("irritate") for another system to react within each system's logic. It is not restricted to interactions between media system communication and other systems.
One has to be careful to take seriously the idea that each functional system operates within its own logic, and not make it seem like certain systems steer others. The heuristic value of the theory of functional differentiation is lost otherwise and the result is another Luhmann-bending hot-take. So, in this sense, Prof. Moeller is right that his content is related to mass-media-communication ;)
@@DavidJ.Rivers-ln4bw Well, my accusation against Luhmann is that his theories are very useful to depoliticise the role by the subsystems in the deadly outcome, that we see unfolding right now in several theaters. And he sure has known that. There are declared attempts like the WH0 wants a waiver to censor media and override the world's constitutions.
Gated "Ivory Tower" at the end of the day is kind of didactic, but counterproductive in real life.
YT algo is very detailed and let's me not explain more to you.
But watch the 3 minutes where Foerster talks about Pavlov and Konorsky, and probably you will understand why he is the real guy.
The circularities among all the stakeholders around the limbo and within the media system goes far beyond these theoretical limits (of functional differentiation). Naturally, they want to play the system.
不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中
Somebody please reply to this comment in one week I need to watch this but I know it is going to be complex and rn I have a lot on my mind thank you
Not really complex but complicated. You won't sleep couple of nights, but you should enjoy this time alot
@@catlionv I'm furious because since a couple of years, media are doing just anything to escape all these theories (that are kind of goodwilling). They have become beasts of conflict.
Slavoj Zizek knows a lot to say about the issue. The inner manipulation becomes some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in obedience to the whims of cruel external powers.
Mass Media constantly has to bring " news" but not new information. Isn't this difference important?
Goddamn
They are “mediators” not “manipulators”.
Of course you don't "know" your mother through media. You judge what your mother is or is not through the lenses of media. Which is beyond mere knowing.
Oops.
Since the growing turbulences and death counts, I had to learn that media has not the right to teach me to judge my family members, peers, relatives, and workplace comrades.
Media is being led by clans that never ever would allow media content to get between themselves and their clan members.
Very I-Luhmann-ating. (sorry).
The point of the book "Manufacturing Consent" is in the title. We Americans supposedly live in a "free" country with elections where we are governed by consent. He then demonstrates how "our consent" (now an imaginary thing) is created by the powerful.
His prescription isn't to "make media better," or "do it right," it's to tear down Capitalism and replace it with someting better.
If you are going to bring a dude in to use as a ringer for your boy to beat up on, you should pick someone different. Or someone you know something about. This isn't good, my guy.
but is the reason of American people's suffering "truly" caused by the "powerful", and the solution "truly" is replacing Capitalism? It is Nomsky's and your assumption, and may not be the correct solution.
@@williampan29 those goalposts far enough away now? First, yes, and yes. You have misused the word "assumption." It is beyond question because it is observable, and demonstrable in any way you'd care to measure. If you really think you got me, take your shot and challenge my assumptions. Second: this was a comment about strawmanning an idea. It could be his view that a powerful cabal of clowns run America from a secret base under the statue of liberty, and if this video said he believed otherwise, and then attacked those ideas instead, it would still be strawmanning, regardless of how true/good his real ideas may or may not be.
forget Luhman. There are many reasons for this. Essentially, he's a functionalist - his interest in in the interconnected relationship between media and viewer; if you like, it's a form of evolutionism where things develop in complexity, but where the components maintain their relationship over time. It negates fundamental change, then: the reason Parsons failed. More than this the media is a strawman here: ideology doesn't begin in the media; the media is part of society, and its journalists are subject to the same cultural influences, the same foregrounding aspects of knowledge as the rest of society. It's merely a useful conduit, then. Further, other institutions that institute knowledge are overlooked: governmental/political institutions, popular protests, economics (all those Robert Cox things) contribute to the paradigm of knowledge structures, as do scientific methodologies (the paradigms through which we model epistemological foundations). This is so oversimplified because Luham focuses on dissemination (epistemology) rather than the laws, everyday realities, global and localized milleu that confronts us (ontology). Whilst knowledge is indeed elliptical and surpasses itself, the iterations of news institutes a tradition (refers back to its originary point constantly). This is just nonsense.
Can we agree that this video is irritating? I am almost always irritated by the professor. Not at all carefree.
He makes you see something in the logics of the "world", that can never more become unseen.
Really disappointing this kind of videos. Simplicitsm is the new academia.
Academia is in the academy. UA-cam does not hurt that, does not prevent anyone to go there.
It is not a sacrileg to make simpler people see something that appeared too complex to them earlier.