This comment is designed to motivate polite and well argumented discussion on the current video's topic, however it has been disguised as if written by a troll to maximize engagement.

Excellent episode. Carefree Wandering is some of the best philosophy on KZfaq.

Probably my favourite channel on KZfaq... Perfect as always.

As always clear and thought provoking. We are so lucky to have such high level content, even with the declared caveat of it being on the mass media. Looking forward to the next video.

I've been waiting for this video. Got so hooked on the last one that I started reading Luhmann and you guys were not kidding about his clarity, or lack of. Thank you!

Excellent stuff! A good balance of useful academic terminology in context with plenty of plain speech to inform a layman's understanding of valuable perspective

This series has been so good especially the culminating sub-series on Luhmann

Thanks God or KZfaq for this channel after searching for Chomski recent interviews. Your second level observations are really inspiring these times

If I am understanding the point about information and non-information correctly, I feel like I have often experienced this in the past in the emotional context of being exhausted and annoyed by news programs which repeat, with slight variance, the same "big story" throughout their daily broadcast. This is one of the reasons why I rarely engage with news sites and never watch news on the TV: these are organizations largely oriented around the enforcement of non-information which you are encouraged to think is highly important because of how it is relayed via informational/visual bombardment.

Great information as always here. Maybe the reason so-called "conspiracy theories" are so popular in our society is because they are a natural reaction to the irritant of media. The conspiracy theory is a kind of societal scar tissue that results from the wound of intrusive messaging. These "theories" serve not just to explain the world, but to deflect any need to evaluate all incoming information equally, or even on its own terms.

This is so brilliant, I feel like I've been lookin for this idea for ten years ...media irritates. That's it

Thanks for this video. Interesting contrast you made between structure of modern mass media and religion. I'm Muslim and pray gives me comfort even if it's centuries old but media constantly produce narratives to sell and stay relevant

This one felt definitely a lot more actually like a lecture, very complex

I say it again, “Ideology today functions primarily through the mediation of resentment.”

This is fantastic! I would definitely watch if you made another video looking more broadly at his systems theory!!

Was already a fan of this channel and this series; and now, after seeing Mr. Moeller has a copy of BLAME! on his shelf, I am sold!

05:58 Irritation 09:35 Time 20:15

Thanks for the videos, haven't heard of Luhmann and you really hook me up or however it is said. Subscribed!

Carsick Cars at the end gets me every time. ❤ Great video as always. Very informative and clear explanation. Thank you!

There's so many comments like this one on youtube, but trust I mean it. Thank you!

Thanks for another great Luhmann video. This has me wondering if we are seeing the birth of an distinct AI social system that could emerge as autonomous AI agents are created that use large language models to communicate, reproduce information, and form subsystems. In a recent paper, researchers created a virtual game development company, assigning roles to agents that talked to each other with an LLM. They worked collaboratively to create a simple game and its documentation. I wonder what Luhmann would have thought of autonomous AI agents communicating with each other to accomplish a goal using a statistical model based on human communication.

There are two levels of knowledge: 1. coming from the outside, like mass media and educational media 2. anecdotal, ie. personal experience, what we see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and how we interact directly with others, and the results of that. Unfortunately, the total priority and higher level of the personal experience is not acknowledged enough, which leads to more bitter failures, like the current wars. Mass media attempt to jump in for the combinatory explosion that not everyone can negotiate a reality with everyone. But this is very limited. Luhmann seems to avoid the factor of ultimate power, that everyone who is important seems to crave for, in democracies even more so.

Can't wait for the final episode already! Would be great if you could talk about Social Media/Citizen Journalism/Twitter, Billionaires/corporates owning mass media in our you analysis.

3:00 cool pick!

We take in the second order observations (known to be known), we also can use our ability to derive a general-other (an abstraction between what we know to be known and what is radically othered from us by sheer virtue of ignorance and misremembering) from significant otherness (alterity) to allow us to draw from first order observations when we view second order observations in media, because ppl have always been aware of this split even if it weren't documented and made me obvious in sensational physical imagery due to audio-visual media, bc the disjoint (but not total disconnect) between general otherness & more intimate familiarity is something established by mirror neurons and spindle neurons during any real or imagined social interaction, including the viewing of this exaggeratedly second-order frame made global by mass media. it's a lot more in our face now in direct "content" packages that mimic "actually being there", yet ppl can indeed see their relational frame while looking at someone else's, though it's sloppy (so i agree it's not transcendental to negotiate the frame of second order observation & one's own first order frame of observation) then what we're left with is people in general always resist this sensational media environment by chopping it down to a bubble and trying to live in bubbles of various sizes and hopping around, i see mass media as the entrusted oral-storyteller roles (advisor, fool, "elder" in the sense of sage, messenger, etc) given excessive vibrance due to technology's ability to mimic moving photorealistic sensory imagery with synchronized sound. I'm splitting hairs, but i see an analogy and repetition of older themes separated by technological environment (medium, media) but the achievement of mass media for better or for worse is the ability to vividly encode the medium itself as the message, when in my earlier example of oral delivery (and written message to another degree) the messenger was showing their presence as the medium of communication as they delivered the information. maybe it's naive, but i usually err on the side of most people adapting their frames of reference enough to eventually see through to the difference between media and intermediary (my understanding of the two layers you summarised, disclosed in presentation & communication). This isn't to disagree with the main thing you said about coding for information/non-info and establishing a sort of illusory "global consensus" that ppl know on some level is partial (thus the scare quotes around 'global') is not a unique indicator of a ontological universality. my addition is that ppl see through it bc we can simultaneously see the frame of the observers we're observing (2nd order) and our own frame of reference (1st order). People have to repress some of each while actually taking in the information, and that does lead to this quasi-suspicion, but we see examples of people negotiating those frames of reference throughout recorded history. So i basically think ppl are mostly experts of that negotiation in every era, but when we step up to the plate of any given social environment, we drop resolution here and enhance resolution elsewhere (salience) to kind of necessarily forget a more granularly negotiated sense of relation to general other in order to feel connected intimately, which is how advertising is able to repeat itself incessantly yet still overall maintain a prominent role in mediating peoples desires and fears. I'm going with what could be a platitude if i didn't elaborate it ("History doesn't repeat, it remixes") but i think it holds as a good rule of thumb that people are all social geniuses in ways that can both see through information and decide when to invoke some and temporarily misremember other information in ways that any messenger can manipulate. i get pulled into an advertisement briefly even if i spent the last few moments disambiguating the bombardment of other ads, for instance. So i guess maybe my autism diagnosis may be relevant here bc part of what leads to overwhelm for me sometimes is that i do see all these frames of reference and i can't always narrow it down without going too narrow (perseveration). i can't repress second order information while processing first order or vice versa ("social pragmatic communication") but most people do as a rule unless perhaps during psychotic events. So i might be generalising the 'royal We' i kept using in this comment to a "severely autistic We" when in the greater scope of things, most people are more "jacked in" to mass media than i can experience (like how i can't suspend my disbelief for more than a couple times within an episode of something before i just feel disconnected from what's being presented to me). other than that caveat, even in people who wouldn't qualify for my diagnosis, second order and first order seem to be minimally separated and negotiable during the same moment of communication and same delivery of information.

If we think of the media as windows on the world, we may suppose that some of these windows are more transparent and less distorting than others. A perfect window neither adds or subtracts, but it still always frames the world. But now suppose we have learned that what we thought were windows, are not windows at all, but rather are screens. Now we may wonder if the images we see are faithful representations from a high resolution camera, or if they are wholly construct, or if they are something in between. Some media systems are more distorting and controlling than others (I presume). Consider a Russian who can only get information from the state meeting. Or an American who chooses to only get information from Media that only tells them the lies they want to believe. Regardless, of where you get your information you generally cannot see the lies that you believe.

I wonder how well those two realities of media can be described by Brentano's intentionality but in a more complex way - first, the media's relation to what they inform us about and second, our relation to media doing their informing job. Those two intentionalities have two opposite tendencies: to merge (we "perceive the world" through the media) and to separate (we perceive the media as something "between" us and the world).

Excellent...in fact, irritatingly excellent. Have you considered commentating on Vilem Flusser? Into the Universe of Technical Images is excellent.

How do you maintain that these systems are different when media institutions, including news and entertainment, are often owned as part of business conglomerates, often news media draw all of there academic analysis from think tanks which are also owned by business conglomerates, and even when they don’t, universities are also often either owned by or courses paid for by… business conglomerates. Both indirectly influencing governments which are made from parties who’s primary income is from donations from the wealthy members of these conglomerates. (Conglomerates here is being used indistinguishably for a verity of businesses entities) however I have come to believe that what has distinguished the early 21st century, is the collapse of differentiations between these systems, not formally as in 20th century totalitarianism but as a series of social and material arrangements with the same end.

i'm always impressed by this content. thanks!

Beautifully explained!

Definitely gonna watch this👌. Hey hans, you make great interesting videos about multiple perspectives which could increase our sensmaking and understanding thank you for that! Can you maybe make a video about alan watts or manly p hall? That would be awesome. Keep up the great work!

So mad men and edward bernays are just simple common people like you and i. Thank you. I sleep better now.

Hans-Georg Moeller, it's clear you've read Luhmann's ideas intensely. But what about his slip-box methodology? You as a philosopher, I'm curious what this says about the human mind as a symbolic network of ideas? Thanks for the video, Luhmann was a great system thinker and was able to break down the symbolic subjective reality humans find themselves in, I think this is why his ideas resonate with me system thinking and symbolic exploration adds a thick description to life experiences in the human experience spectrum.

Very cool! Thanks.

There is a start of an answer, in Foerster's conversation with Maturana about "Truth versus Trust". We should talk about the question what has become of that? We are hoping that our construction of a reality is consistent, and valid for as many other people as possible, right? Chinese philosophy has a picture about that, that is very wellknown to everyone there: Pointing to a deer and telling that it is a horse. A man did this to find out who would be loyal to him, and who might become his enemy, if the situation in the social environment becomes more conflicting.

I think he describes the society as "modern" rather than "postmodern" because he himself is quite postmodern in his approach so everything a postmodern approach notices becomes "modern" by comparison by its position in the endless discourse.

Knowledge and power have always been conjoined. Real power is usually hidden, force is visible.

You also can say that manipulators are outside, because their skin isn't really in the game and they don't get the same treatment as so called target audience. And that's a slippery slope towards dehumanisation of "clients" far beyond surgeon's syndrome (idk if it's called so in english).

"I'm specifically saying there ARE NOT people in smoke filled rooms pulling strings. But that doesn't compute. So Wolfe, or whoever, hears me saying there IS a smoke filled room with people pulling strings." Chomsky

Great video

that was absolutely mind blowing. Since you are moving back to strict media, what is the best next steps to getting into the more general theory of luhmann? a specific book or other resource?

In this sense arent descriptions of reality also constructions of background reality and not really describing anything at all? This would turn Luhmanns "how can we describe the reality of their construction of reality" into how can we *construct* the reality of their construction of reality (?) In this context what purpose does describing even do? (Perpetuating media use? Maintaining us within its framework?) Isnt it self defeating in the end, since this just irritates us even more? This is not to say a great rising would "fix" things but where does this take us? I find this confusing (perhaps im irritated lol) and probably one of the videos I most like, wonderful job!

Fantastic video! thank you

"Believed 2B believed." Captain (Long John) Sinclair.

ty for doing this💚

Interesting. I have read a few of Luhmann's books but never this one. Listening to your presentation of it makes me think, he might have not been very precise in the application of his theory. Treating advertising and movies as instances of mass-media-communication (application of the code), is not convincing to me. As you nicely emphasize, there is an important distinction between the distribution infrastructure and the code-lead communication. So, it is possible to say that organizations that self-describe as "media", "publishing" or "news" do not use the distribution infrastructure solely for "information" in the code sense, but also publish advertising - which is best understood as primarily enticing economic communication (make people buy stuff). (Although to which system(s) an operation "belongs" is determined by the subsequent communication event chains.)

Could we get some reading guide/list for Luhmann's works?

quote at 8:50 sounds very Heidegerrian

不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中

Mass Media constantly has to bring " news" but not new information. Isn't this difference important?

Somebody please reply to this comment in one week I need to watch this but I know it is going to be complex and rn I have a lot on my mind thank you

Goddamn

They are “mediators” not “manipulators”.

forget Luhman. There are many reasons for this. Essentially, he's a functionalist - his interest in in the interconnected relationship between media and viewer; if you like, it's a form of evolutionism where things develop in complexity, but where the components maintain their relationship over time. It negates fundamental change, then: the reason Parsons failed. More than this the media is a strawman here: ideology doesn't begin in the media; the media is part of society, and its journalists are subject to the same cultural influences, the same foregrounding aspects of knowledge as the rest of society. It's merely a useful conduit, then. Further, other institutions that institute knowledge are overlooked: governmental/political institutions, popular protests, economics (all those Robert Cox things) contribute to the paradigm of knowledge structures, as do scientific methodologies (the paradigms through which we model epistemological foundations). This is so oversimplified because Luham focuses on dissemination (epistemology) rather than the laws, everyday realities, global and localized milleu that confronts us (ontology). Whilst knowledge is indeed elliptical and surpasses itself, the iterations of news institutes a tradition (refers back to its originary point constantly). This is just nonsense.

Very I-Luhmann-ating. (sorry).

Of course you don't "know" your mother through media. You judge what your mother is or is not through the lenses of media. Which is beyond mere knowing.

The point of the book "Manufacturing Consent" is in the title. We Americans supposedly live in a "free" country with elections where we are governed by consent. He then demonstrates how "our consent" (now an imaginary thing) is created by the powerful. His prescription isn't to "make media better," or "do it right," it's to tear down Capitalism and replace it with someting better. If you are going to bring a dude in to use as a ringer for your boy to beat up on, you should pick someone different. Or someone you know something about. This isn't good, my guy.

Can we agree that this video is irritating? I am almost always irritated by the professor. Not at all carefree.

Really disappointing this kind of videos. Simplicitsm is the new academia.