System One is a piece of software that takes the computer very seriously. Sixty years after its invention the computer is coming of age. It starts to actively take part in communication. It is no longer trying to simulate human consciousness but acknowledges another challenge which is to deal with the form of the social.

We offer sociological insight and sociological research to monitor what is going on. We rely on Niklas Luhmann's distinction between the three cultural forms of the literal society of Greek and Roman antiquity, the printing press society of modern Europe, and the computer society of our global era (see Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Ffm. 1997, pp. 405-12; see also Dirk Baecker, Wozu Soziologie? Berlin 2004, pp. 125-149). Each cultural form is called "cultural" because it first of all has to deal with the surplus meaning offered by new mass media of distribution.

The introduction of writing means that society has to invent ways to deal with the problem that meaning is not just appearing and disappearing as in oral communication but is here to stay, to be memorized, to be relied upon when confronted with new meaning and thus to destabilize - to "displace" - a society fluid in present changes of meaning. Writing, for Platon, seemed to freeze society and thus to prevent it of its lifeliness and all forms of human responsibility coming with it.

The introduction of printing means that society gains possibilities to compare and critize manuscripts now being standardized and mass distributed well beyond the walls of cloisters and libraries thus putting all forms of classical authority in jeopardy. Add paper money, bonds, school certificates, leaflets, and newspapers and you immediately start to imagine how modern society went off for a form of social dynamics not in accordance with tradional ways of local knowledge and authority.

The computer is adding its introduction into processes of communication in ways which make it impossible for human users to know exactly what is going on, who is saying what, what sources are reliable and what sources aren't, or who is meant by certain acts of communication. The computer is adding its capacities of computing both to the content and the style of the meaning communicated thus deconstructing the ways to know our ways we were used to.

These are three forms of surplus meaning, and of course they are not the only ones. Add letters, movies, television, and mobile phones, or even ships, trains, cars, and planes, and you come up with further ways to charge society with surplus possibilities of meaning it was beforehand not used to and has a good deal of difficulties to adopt to.

Sticking with writing, printing, and computing, Luhmann offers the idea to speak of three cultural forms which enabled society to deal with their respective forms of surplus meaning. Aristotle's idea of "telos" presented society with the possibility to deal with the surplus meaning of writing by always asking, in oral and literal communication, what the purpose, the end, the aim of some communication might be. Anything not having a purpose one would be prepared to accept could be neglected. And that made life easy again.

Descartes' idea of self-referential restlessness (on which he originally wanted to base his methodology of secure individual knowledge) presented society with the possibility to deal with the surplus meaning of printed communication by watching the emergence of a modern and to that extent "individual" identity taking shape in exactly jumping from one piece of meaning to another one without loosing the sense of oneself. The masterpiece of that technique of individual self-shaping in dealing with printed communication are Montaigne's Essais (1580). Again, life was made easy by gaining a technique to neglect what does not fit.

Luhmann is very cautious in spelling out the cultural form of the computer society. He does not give a name of somebody who possibly already invented the appropriate form. He hints, nevertheless, to the idea of complexity, taking shape together with the introduction of the computer in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the notion of form itself, fleshed out by G. Spencer-Brown in his 1969 book on "Laws of Form". Complexity, in its W. Ross Ashby version, means that we start to acknowledge explicitly what we of course implicity (or, tacitly) already knew and did well before that notion saw the light of the day, which is, that the world consists of a big number of heterogeneous variables, linked in various and highly selective ways such that any "true" understanding is impossible. Understanding gives way to "control" which means, for Ashby (see "Requisite Variety and Its Implications for the Control of Complex Systems". In: Cybernetica vol. 1, 1958, pp. 83-99), (1) Look at what happens, not at why it happens! (2) Do not collect more information than necessary for the job at hand! (3) And do not assume that the system does not change, that is, take into account that you can only solve the problems of today! The art of dealing temporarily with temporary situations, for Luhmann, became the art of the day.

But to complexity Luhmann added Spencer-Brown's notion of form which, possibly (and well being aware of a Buddhist knowledge akin to that) for the first time in mathematics and logics, is assuming not only that all cognition is based on distinctions (that is a classical assumption), but also that any distinction combines a marked state with an unmarked state, an uncertain knowledge with a necessary ignorance. Neglect what you don't see fitting with your highly selective dealing with complexity, yet keep in mind that you did neglect something, and get back to this as you think appropriate. That seems to be a possible way to phrase a canon that keeps life simple even in world society.

Sociological insight and research in monitoring our society's ways to deal with the introduction of the computer may start right here: What forms will we be using when sitting at our laptop and desktop computers and having instantly to decide what to look at, what to take serious, and what not, what message to accept, and what message to send to whom? What are the distinctions that prove their value in maintaining our facination in working with the computer while protecting us from the addiction and frustration coming with it? Why have aristotelian teleology (guarded by ancient cosmology) and cartesian restlessness (guarded by modern rationality) give way to spencer-brownian form (guarded by creative ignorance)?

Our sociological insight and research in monitoring the introduction of System One will combine a kind of media theory with second-order cybernetics' notions of communication and observation, and with an evolutionary theory of the world society which first of all looks at the way systems and organizations, networks and institutions, individuals and families, succeed in maintaining and changing their form of reproduction. The necessary resources we will introduce as we proceed and as we see will fit. But to have an idea of what is coming, look at Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Ffm. 1997), Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essais on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York 2003), and Dirk Baecker, Form und Formen der Kommunikation (Ffm. October 2005).