Meeting 1 Notes

Co-ordinator = Rebecca Herron

PARTICIPANTS

• We need a conceptualisation of the nature of Society. Society has no nature, this means that we are thinking about something that has no nature, and what is society then? A social system is something that has an expected uncertainty. The nature of society is distributedness, expected information to be communicated and then the social process is of course this expectation of communication. Power, in this context, is the capacity of the system to reproduce itself. 
• Are we going to produce a theory for the conceptualisation of the nature of society or are we observing the practice to describe the society, or what are we going to do to conceptualise the nature of society? Perhaps, we can say that here there is a practice of society but the society is not an agency, so it has no practice in itself. But it can be observed. 
• The statement that gave rise to this topic is the following: "In order to explore the forms which may emerge from the co-evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social processes we need a better conceptualisation of the nature of society, social processes and power than we currently have". It is fruitful to actually look at what we currently have and what is the limitation of what we currently have. The statement implies that there is a need for something else; it could be useful to look at this. 
• What is the definition of society? Is society a group of people? Or is it the behaviour of those people? It might be worth to look at that, if it is a group of people we can observe their behaviour although it will be hard to say which society we are looking at but we could observe their behaviour and their practices.
• I agree that society has no nature. In order to distinguish society we need to distinguish what is not a society and instead of saying that we need a better conceptualisation, we need to invent this 'conceptualisation'. It is not to do a reform to make it perfect, the underlying question is how can we understand what stands under us, what are the processes which we are aimed to be involved? The problem is that we are trying to put those processes in some pots in which they don't fit, and since we are just used to put them in the pots they fit, we are trying to squeeze something. In the process of squeezing that, we are going to reproduce a hierarchical power relation. In order to explore these forms, what should we invent? How could we invent it? Perhaps a history that would make sense of a history we are living is needed.
• What is the relation of these to conceptualisation? Well, a conceptualisation is just an invention through which we decide that something has to make sense to us.
• I think that 'We' is the problem, we need to do that, we need to conceptualise etc, our understanding of society is again as a social system but social systems don't exist, they have only a tendency to exist. We cannot talk about society as something that is but we can talk about society that can be considered as something. These different conceptualisations can be spelled out in rich semantics. Then I would call this sociology. That is my conceptualisation, which I expect is different from yours.
• But if there is nothing in common there is no understanding.
• I am not sure of that, of course we are living in a common world, I think that the main question is not about the existence of a commonality but of a translation from your understanding to my understanding.
• But in order to have that translation we need at least a bridge.
• The idea of having a commonality is equivalent to ask for the origin. Society is not an emerging form with an origin and a future but at present we reconstruct the past. It is an emerging understanding that is not necessarily based on the commonality that went before.
• I agree with that totally, that is why I use the word 'invent', for that invention we need a link, it is not the invention made by one of us but it is the invention we do together. That is why I would like to see the understanding of society as talking of the same thing. It is constructing the past for the present.
• We need communication competencies to do that. And these are shaped in commonalities. The question is how do we appreciate the chat relation in the society. How do we transform that primary into a more symbolic mediated communication?
• You need to find yourself first then become part of society. In that understanding we are all the time coming in circles.
• But, why do we need a better conceptualisation of society in reference to ICT? ICT is the real domain of virtual communication.

CRITICS

• Can you explore more into the relationship between group conceptualisation and forms? Why would you like to conceptualise anything?
• The first statement is about a social re-distribution, how can you add that to ICT? If you add the domain of virtual communication, what is its effect? Is it good or bad?
• I would like to push you a bit further, particularly on the definition of society. You are going away from a definition of society into the exploration of processes but I think that if you define society as a form you cannot explore society without going into forms. I think you need to go beyond the processes to the resources of society, to the society's richness and not constraints.
• I have three things to say. The first is drawing your attention to the lead question, which says that we want to explore the forms that emerge from the co-evolution of information and communication technologies and social processes. Therefore you need somebody talking about that. You need to very pragmatic about it. My second point is that I disagree very strongly with the notion that society has no nature. If you look at Germany, it has a nature and it has a very strong ICT that grows that nature, there is something in this common understanding. The third point is taken from Soft Systems Methodology about the fact that a social process means different things to different people therefore a bridge is needed.
• I agree with your point that we need to invent the story with which we will make the sense of history. I like very much the invention point but invention is only one method. The other method, which would be useful, is discovery. I very much like the concept of invention but invention cannot be alone; invention and discovery are very much in one process.
• Communications get people to act in a particular way. For instance if you say that somebody is a witch suddenly it changes your perception because there is a cultural history of the myth. Why communications affect people in a particular way? 

PARTICIPANTS

• We want to discover something in the social reality. To invent a new story it is important to improve the observation of this society to understand reality, but from a trans-disciplinary point of view. 
• Why does it have to be trans-disciplinary? 
• Because it is not only a problem of sociologist but it is a problem of trans-disciplinary viewers. Within sociology we extract more than one tradition and society has such richness. But we should make clear that we are making a distinction between the subject we are studying, which is society, and the description of that system, which is sociology. In sociology the richness may come from authoring the subject in the society but we only have access to descriptions of society. The richness of sociology is that it provides us with so many angles to study society, and within those angles we expect codification to occur. Here we are talking about access and that has occurred within sociology, for example the sociology which takes an invention perspective or that which takes an actors perspective that looks at how can I make a story line of that, for instance network traditions, or the sociology of translation. There is also structural functionalism that looks at what is the latent dimension of networks, which is a different angle that does not take a historical access perspective. I am not in favour of taking only a process perspective. There is a story line and it means that there is a black box, which we call society, which is the 'external reference' of that story line. 
• The difficult issue is society and the social processes. ICT is the basic communication technology. How can we translate one semantic into the semantic in order to recover all the richness of society? I am pleading for developing sociology as a science, which develops all those semantics and these processes enormously enhanced by ICT. 
• In addressing some of the points brought up by critics we need to develop a way of making distinctions of our society. What are we going to understand as a society? I would not even go into a discussion whether it has a nature or not but at least we need to have something that links us in order for us to be looking for something in common. There is a second thing, it is important to link that to the broader question not just to the question of this group but also to the opening question of the syntegration. There is a third thing, we can use not just the invention of stories but also the discovery and perhaps we have to see to discover what can we discover of the society we are looking. I think ICT is just revealing us the society we are seeing, in other words we should discover in ICT the society we are seeing.
• It makes sense to ask what is then our position in society because if we think of society as a distributed system, then to certain extend we are missed individually and that is a bit frightening idea. We will be missed by our neighbours and our beloved ones. If society is 'composed of communication and people are the environment' I think there is an immense problem of human condition but that is not our subject discussion.
• I think it is useful when we say that people's interactions create society. It ties in very well with other topics in discussion because we are talking about micro-interactions creating something at a higher level as was mentioned in the RED group. In this case the individual would create a society and their mutually expected interactions would be the norms of society that will grow up form micro-interactions. This analysis says that the human being no longer makes the society but their interactions make society.
• What kind of instrument is ICT for the observation of society? Is it a good instrument?
• Yes, perhaps it is the best instrument in the sense that it is an emergent form of our society. But how are we observing the society? 
• When you say that ICT is an instrument to see society I am a bit dubious. ICT is very textual, in a sense it is very linguistic. I think in the cultural evolution of society we have already witnessed the functional differentiation, which means that science is different from religion and science is different from economics. In these different functional domains of society not every communication has to be mediated by language, it can also be symbolically mediated. I am not too sure whether Internet provides us with means to account for symbolic mediation. Internet is not rich enough to provide all the connotations so it is not really broadband, it doesn't add surplus value of giving all the contexts at the same time. But within inter-human conversation we have a richer a communication, many channels stand open and are interacting at the same time. I always tend to think about what Simons says, that complex systems operate with alphabets so we probably have an alphabet of communication channels. My major concern at the moment is how do we get a system to study that alphabet because ICT has a tendency to rely on text.