Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

observer, of course, language must also represent more than perceived noise. By participating in verbal communication, participants learn to draw a distinction between organized and unorganized noise. Language is used to code world events and meaning. Furthermore, it doubles all events and all meaning. Everything that can be said, can be said in a positive or in a negative way: in a sentence using “no,” or in a sentence using “yes.” Language itself is coded using this basic binary structure, a decisive characteristic when it comes to communicative innovation and, in the long run, to social evolution. To clarify the unique qualities of language, we compare and contrast noise-specification in humans and animals and discuss the human voice box from an evolutionary perspective.

Social system theory explains how communication increases its ability to successfully establish different kinds of connections by constructing symbolically generalized media or success media, as we explain in chapter 5. Symbolically generalized media help participants in society assess and manage the contingencies of one another's motivations. The use of symbolically generalized media appears to “cause” the acceptance of communicated propositions. We focus our discussion on four success media: love, power, truth, and money. We conclude the chapter by relating the differentiation of success media to the differentiation of symbiotic mechanisms that structurally couple society and human bodies.

Contemporary social system theory describes society as the overarching system that includes all communication. On the one hand, the all-encompassing unity of society cannot be observed, but it can be delineated clearly in terms of the theory. On the other hand, very small “ephemeral, trivial, short lived” social systems may appear whenever observers rely on the autopoiesis of communication to cope with the experience of double contingency (Luhmann 1997a:812). We distinguish three types of relatively stable social systems in chapter 6, each one drawing a distinction between itself and its environment by means of an exclusive distinction between system and environment. Interactions are observable as the most immediate social systems and include partners in communication who are present for one another. Organizations are observed as social systems comprised of decisions made within