Any organizational choice, or so our Spencer-Brown form tells us, is bound to find a value for the variable of communication.
Communication means that independent identities (human beings, organizational units, network nodes...) seek and structure an interdependence between them (and others), which is accounting for their independence. There are several notions of communication we may be able to work with. The first one, of course, is Shannon's probabilistic notion relying on an understanding of communication, which looks for redundancy to be observed, and for variety to be checked on, for any one information somehow produced by a process understood as a relation between a source (and a possible "sender") and a destination (and a possible "receiver"). The second notion extends on the Shannonian one by introducing semantic aspects into it and by doing this, interestingly enough, via an understanding of communication that both produces, and has to deal with, confusion and disinformation. Paul Watzlawicks became famous with and for such an understanding of communication. See above all other books he has written his stunning book "How Real is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication" (New York 1976, German transl. 1976). But Umberto Eco, for instance, as well started to look at communication by starting to look at the possibilitiy of, and handling of, lies (La struttura assente, Milano 1968). And conversation analysis ever since Harvey Sacks' wonderful "Lectures on Coversation" (Oxford 1992) never did anything else but to look for procedural rules that allowed for con games (confidence games) to be conceived of and launched, as well as to be unravelled.
That is why we conceive, in our form of organizational choice, of a re-entry mechanism of "gaming", which at the same time describes what communication may be up to, and how the purpose and dynamics of communication get framed by the organization (or process of organizing) they are considered to be a part of. Gaming, here, means both playing (and playing around) and preying (catching, killing). The English language allows for this double sense of the word, and tops it by having to meanings of the adjective "game" as well, which are "brave" and "crippled", respectively.
Thus, communication in organizations (and possibly elsewhere), when it comes to organizational choice, means both playing and falling prey to somebody or something and making prey of somebody or something.
Communication varies, as processes of organizing vary, yet the distinction between communication, on one hand, and organization, on the other, being re-entered into the form via that kind of gaming is a constant of the form we are inquiring in.
System One will have to account for it. Indeed, it already accounts for it by focusing on the single user of the system to be the subject of his and her choices. Looking at the information presented to him and her by the search algorithmes and semantic webs of the computer, the user is always in the position to make up his and her mind with respect to the game he and she are, and want to be, or beware of being, a part of. Any one organizational choice, with System One, is a choice respectful for its social, material, and temporal selections of matters to be pursued, and matters to be avoided. It's like in real life. That makes it so useful.
The notion of communication, thanks to Gregory Bateson, Jurgen Ruesch, Paul Watzlawick and a few others (e.g., Harvey Sacks who, however, spoke of conversation; and Niklas Luhmann), is a notion central to an epistemology which is contemporaneous to the computer and during the 20th century slowly gaining the same importance as the epistemology of causality central to a whole European tradition of sciences well into the 19th century. Causality relates cause and effect. Communication relates the undetermined with self-determination so typical of "self-organisation" which, notabene, is the answer to the discovery of "complex" phenomena which are neither so simple that we can describe them by singling out two or three variables determining them (causality) nor so homogeneous that can describe them by computing a great number of elements adding up to them (statistics). Complexity needs communication which is the introduction of degrees of freedom as a necessary precondition for heterogeneous variables and elements seeking their identity by controlling each other and offering control of themselves. The latter adds Harrison C. White networks to communication.
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. ... read full article.