مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Today’s society and life in general is characterized by the allencompassing fast change and movement. New technologies, new jobs, new opportunities, new dangers – i.e. new unknowns – seem to fall on us before we are able to figure out how to make sense of the current ones. Our psychological reactions vary among: (1) attempts to ‘stabilize’ the environment (social, political, technological, biological) by imposing more controls and checkpoints; (2) calls to embrace the change and ride its wave towards a ‘new world order’; (۳) ad-hoc proposals for dealing with challenges of our times (e.g. information overload); or — (۴) a sense of helpless dis-attachment.

No matter what is the specific reaction to the socio-technological change we are experiencing, it is based on a way we make sense of ourselves, others and the world. Usually we base our sense-making on perceivable stable objects and their relationships in the world. A specific configuration of such objects and relationships within a system describes its state. The change of the system is then perceived as a chain of transitions between states. This is a well established mode of thinking which helped us tremendously in achieving most of what human civilization created since its beginning. But is it still valid in the era of the ever accelerating change?

This paper proposes the original conceptual framework for thinking about a changing social system and applies it to the contemporary situation of the global information society. The gist of the framework is the approach to a social system as a living cognitive system — an ecology of interacting social subsystems. We do this by developing the concept of the Living Cognitive Society — a distributed social system characterized by the interaction of multiplicity of heterogeneous agents and subsystems. First, we analyse the current situation of a global society, its underlying reasons and ask a question ‘what kind of global system could sustain and thrive in these circumstances?’ (Section 2). Then we provide a detailed tour to the theoretical concepts which form the basis of the framework (Section 3). The description of the main concepts is followed by the rationale of their integration (Section 4), which explicates the application of the theoretical basis of our framework to the situation of the global society. The locus of the paper is the detailed characterization of the Living Cognitive Society in terms of its structure, dynamics and the mechanisms at work (Section 5), building on notions and concepts introduced in the previous sections. Finally, we apply the concept and mechanisms of the framework to the thinking about the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly Internet, on the global society (Section 6). The issue of the governance of a Living Cognitive Society is intricately related to the mechanisms at work within the system, and also represents a distinct challenge and the field of research. We therefore dedicate the last section for introducing the paradigm of distributed governance (Section 7) as an avenue for future research.