Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age by Christian Fuchs

By Christian Fuchs

During this extraordinary learn, Christian Fuchs discusses how the web has remodeled the lives of humans and social relationships in modern society. via outlining a social thought of the net and the data society, he demonstrates how the ecological, financial, political, and cultural structures of latest society were reworked by way of new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new sorts of cooperation and pageant are complex and supported by means of the web in subsystems of society and in addition discusses possibilities and dangers of the knowledge society.

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The relationship of system and environment is constituted by the system’s closing off its self-reproduction against the environment by internal circular structures and by being only exceptionally—only on other levels of reality—irritated, built up, and put into oscillation. We term this case resonance” (Luhmann 2004, 40; author’s translation). For Luhmann, systems are not open, interconnected, in complex causal relationships, and in processes of exchange. Contact between a system and its environment is only considered as an exception from the rule and as a very weak disturbance for the normal systemic functioning.

Representatives of evolutionary economics frequently argue that self-organization means the theorem of the invisible hand of Adam Smith (Witt 1997). Kevin Kelly (1995, 1999) says that the market is a self-­organizing vivi-system that has the capacity to regulate itself. Andrew Dunsire considers governance as an autopoietic system and says that, hence, social systems are “unregulable from any center if not altogether ungovernable” (Dunsire 1996, 301). The idea that markets and capitalism are self-regulating and that political influences are harmful has, in the context of self-organization theory, been most widely discussed by Friedrich August von Hayek.

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” (Smith 1976, 477). For Hayek, society is guided by Smith’s invisible hand, which would help maintaining order, although social relationships wouldn’t be actively planned but unconsciously and spontaneously organized. “We are led—for example, by the pricing system in market exchange—to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend” Self-Organization and Cooperation 25 (Hayek 1988, 14).

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