Coming back to our problem of network synthesis and social action having to navigate its way as part of that synthesis, we may note that all of these four dissemination media, whose successful introduction defines, respectively, the tribal, the ancient, the modern, and the next society, contribute to an overall culture which consists in dealing with the overflow of meaning. To act socially means to be able to both participate in the production of overflow, and to reduce it to some measure participants are able to deal with. One insight stemming from our analysis of dissemination media extending on Luhmann's conjecture about the culture form they necessitate, consists in the usefulness of being precise about the overflow and its framing being two sided of one coin. It is not only that overflows are the rule, and framing is improbable, as Michel Callon suggests, but it is the evolutionarily improbable framing which defines the overflow it is both overtaxed by, and dealing with. It is this idea of the two-sidedness of overflow and framing which fits our sociological thinking into a constructivist epistemology, which we are indeed here looking for.

To close this chapter we may try to capture this idea of framings defining their overflow by giving each one of our four societies a particular kind of social order. To be sure, to be able to distinguish among four societies means to describe variations of one and only one society, given that the society may evolutionarily be one of those famous once and for all inventions of which we speak with respect to the world, life, language, and consciousness. So any one of these societies and of its orders may be able, given the circumstances, to turn into one of the other varieties, the presence or not of a new dissemination medium becoming dominant, being, however, a restriction which blocks any arbitrary switching of the overall states of the society and its culture.

We propose to distinguish between the culture form of a society dealing with the overflow of the meaning disseminated through a new medium, the number form of the society, which delineates the places that get numbered with respect to people, events, or actions occurring and being addressed, its reflection form, which provides for general affirmation and negation, and the social order of the society. The social order we assume to be a switching device defining, and thereby providing for, forks that serve to redistribute constancies. Let us for a moment focus on the latter because they shed a specific light on what we may mean by network synthesis. Note, that the term of social order we here employ differs from the one proposed by Talcott Parsons. What Parsons is calling "social order," we rather call the number form of a society, thereby regaining a notion of social order, which has more space for the dynamics of oscillation between different values of the same variables than Parsons perhaps thought necessary.

The notion of social order here refers to both a mechanism and a dynamism. It defines which features to address if the society in dealing with the meaning it is trying to capture has to exchange structures in order to be able to do so. It tells that variation inside a society does not stem from parameters changing, but from parameters working such that constancies get redistributed. For any one society in any one given situation that is drama enough, yet it needs, in order to be acted out, a kind of second-order social order, a social order dealing not with specific meanings, trying to get them fixed, but with the overflow of meaning, trying to manage it according to the culture form, structure, and reflection of the society. Any one of these social orders of the different societies we here distinguish, is a combination once again of reference, self-reference, and general network value, and thereby contributes to the network synthesis of social action.

In that sense, the tribal society's social order are *secrets*. Secrets, and taboos coming with them, are a kind of metacommunication which regulates what, and how, to communicate about, and what not. They define reference in that they, in order to work at all, tell about their being indications of things to be kept secret. The define self-reference in that they order the members of the tribe according to what, and how, they may be allowed to talk about. And they, by definition, account for the unmarked state in that they indicate the things kept secret as the things not to be marked, a feature which of course invites paradox and is exploited accordingly, in both attracting and frightening the tribe by calling its attention to things forbidding any attention.

The network synthesis of social action here consists in any one action being situated with respect to some secret, drawing the line, transcending the line, walking the line, obeying the line, or whatever. So whatever happens may at once be judged with respect to the secrets kept or the secrets threatened, without keeping anybody from either curiously or anxiously exploring the secrets as long as they are kept. A certain dramaturgy of the tribe is added by sorting men and women, old and young, sick and healthy according to the secrets they are initiated into, or are kept distant from. Initiation rites, *rites de passage*, make it visible to everybody what is at stake and who belongs where, any one of the boundaries drawn by the secrets inviting a more or less ecstatic and orgiastic re-entry into the communication just to be sure that both of its sides do indeed exist.

The social order of secrets does not consist in that they keep something secret, of course, but in the relationships between people, events, and situations they order by telling everybody who knows the secrets' content (which may be nil), who guards them, and who just knows about there being a secret, by defining a dramaturgy of initiation and evasion, and by marking situations with respect to the secrets which are to be kept. Switching, or redistributing the constancies, here means that people may seek for which one of the secrets available they adhere to, means that people may, via initiation, change the side with respect to knowledge of, and knowledge about, a secret, and means that people may, if need be, know which secrets to exploit or which secrets to disregard in order to frighten, fascinate, or otherwise commit, bewitch, and spellbind their fellow people.

The social order of the ancient society, in turn, seems to be *authority*. Authority helps to settle which purposes may claim what right in which situation, without keeping anybody from trying at a new, or different, authority with respect to other purposes. Authority as well defines reference, self-reference, and the unmarked state to account for, in that it defines the purpose, its owner or address, and some unknown space of possibilities, or network, where new purposes and their authority claims may come from. This unknown space of possibilities is socially produced by the authority always only claiming, but never being able to prove, its right. There is some mystery being involved with authority, a "mystery of moderation" (Xenophon, The Oikonomikos, XXI, 12), stemming from a politics of scarcity and of promises to keep it at bay, which is never solved in ancient society, yet gets exploited with respect to trials, destruction, and re-institution of authority.

The network synthesis of ancient society, thus, walks the line of authority as the tribal society walks the line of secrets. Social strata help in both securing who may challenge whose authority and who not, and in thereby singling out challenges unheard of but all the more attractive and threatening. There is no social action which does not know in which shadow of what authority it is trying to get its cover, or to which authority it should switch to in order to be able to legitimate its purpose. And there is no social action which does not try to figure out how to shed light on spots which claim authority without having the means to possibly defend it. Like the secrets in tribal society, authority in ancient society is a switching device which enables social action, without leaving the realm of authority, to challenge it, to claim for a different one, and to search for means able to institutionalize a mystery which lends authority by blocking, and thereby, sooner or later inviting, further questions.

In the case of the modern society a switching device has already been identified by sociological theory. Here, Harrison C. White calls *publics* the reference and area which enable social action to change context and content. Drawing on an idea developed by Erving Goffman that all social action needs not only perfomance but also audience, White defines publics as those addresses of reference, self-reference, and, indeed, network, which let social action both define and redefine, via decontextualization and recontextualization, which are easier to tell than to do, its situation.

Publics are perfect to both demand for and frame a certain restlessness in selecting possible action in politics or on markets, in schools or in hospitals, in the arts or in sports, with respect to both restless and scarce attention. The unmarked states which they allow to account for, are states of fact, of time, or of the social, in that to watch a public means to know that you do not know what next it may be interested in, how long its attention prevails, and who may be the one to either confirm a certain interest or to be the first to defect. Again, as in secrets and in authority, a public is a constant which allows for variation, or better, which secures the variation of social action.

The next society as well will need a kind of social order. Again we do not leave the realm of speculation. If we go by negative selection, certainly neither secrets, nor authorities, nor publics are of much help when it comes to a social order as a means to give at once an overall picture of the society dealing with the computer, and a guiding idea of how possibly to change place and site inside it. What is defining the relations between people, events, and situations, when, at any instant, an overflow of network control is to be contained by form and to be structured by knowledge? And, with respect to the next society's obsessio with *bios*, what may possibly lend social order to the reflection of the body being at risk and being at home at the same time?

I think that an emergent understanding of the notion of *space* might be suitable to denote the social order coming with the next society. Space is a category which is able to capture reference, self-reference, and a general network value via its calling for a neighborhood, for a site, and for open fringes, loosely organized via ideas about the inside and the outside of a space, yet above all defined via the possibility to relate to, and to switch, places. Space means that things and events may get together, and may be told apart. Since Kant it is the most robust category to deal with contradictions (via position), on one hand, and with fusion and confusion (via transposition), on the other. And last not least, space is even considered to be a possible category to reflect on the unity of the difference of position and transposition by thinking about a something being able to give rise to both.

Space means to reflect on place and to account for the unexpected. It conveniently encompasses the real and the virtual space as both offer places, envision a site, and are open to the unexpected. It provides for the factor of time which changes the perception and conception of the dimensions of proximity and distance, thus even playing, as a kind of re-entry of the notion into itself, with the idea of a "placeless" society, of the "abolishment" of the dimension of space, which of course both is nonsense with respect to theory and concept, yet tells a lot about the empirical experience of the multidimensionality of space.

The notion of space has room for physical, chemical, organic, mental, social, and artificial , i.e., machines', computers', and computer grids', siting, and thus provides for a multitude of topological orderings which serve as much to keep things together as to keep track of their switching and moving about. Any one place in space is considered a node, a bifurcation, a crossroad of some sense and process. It is a stable address for unstable things and passing events, an address, though, which proves to be determinate only with respect to indeterminate capturing. It has its role in self-organization, so much seems to be for sure, yet to know more about it is precluded by complexity.

So much for a rough overview of the impact of different dissemination media on the network synthesis of society. Our next chapter develops a model of social action for the next society which is considered to be the last, or uppermost, level of all other societies, along with the dissemination media they have to deal with, the culture, structure, and reflection forms they developed, and the social order they use to allow for variation, all of them still being present, even if in some supplementary, not really dominant, state. Social action of course means that one may still head for secrets, authority, or a public, and that pockets of the actual society are perfectly suitable for such ways to orientate social action to social situation. Yet, what we call the next society, the knowledge society, or the globalized, the world society, constrains each one of these received orientations to become reframed with respect to the overflow of meaning to be captured, with respect to the number form to give structure to the society, with respect to the social order providing for switches, and with respect to its reflection giving it its perspectives of negation and affirmation.

Knowledge and space, in the next society, get the upper hand over secrets, authority, and even publics, and that is why we have to account for some kind of an archeology of meaning, embedded within any one social action, on one hand, and new, or next, kinds to connect, to separate, and to move about, on the other.