what do you mean by saying: #communication?

Again and again I am asked: “What is com­mu­ni­ca­tion?”

My answer is: “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a three­fold selec­tion of infor­ma­tion, utter­ance, and under­stand­ing.”

End of announce­ment. And because almost nobody is ever sat­is­fied with that, I go on talk­ing after all: In the spring of 1986, in a lec­ture in Hei­del­berg that lat­er became very famous, Niklas Luh­mann said that he want­ed to present a con­cept of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that “strict­ly avoids any ref­er­ence to con­scious­ness or life, that is, to oth­er lev­els of the real­iza­tion of autopoi­et­ic sys­tems.”

So Luh­mann does not iden­ti­fy com­mu­ni­ca­tion by its car­ri­er, not by its medi­um, and not by the orig­i­na­tor of a state­ment. Bod­ies do not com­mu­ni­cate. Machines do not com­mu­ni­cate. “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­mu­ni­cates, not human beings.” (Per­haps that remains his most famous sen­tence to this day.)

What is bril­liant about this is that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is there­by pulled out of all dif­fuse­ness and grasped as some­thing observ­ably sharp, some­thing that can be real­ized not only in lan­guage, voice, writ­ing, or mov­able type, but also in code. Either com­mu­ni­ca­tion is present. Or it is not. Entire­ly dig­i­tal: ((either)or). There is no such thing as a lit­tle bit of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Once again: “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a three­fold selec­tion of infor­ma­tion, utter­ance, and under­stand­ing.”

Here, infor­ma­tion is not sim­ply the oppo­site of noise, as in Shan­non. Infor­ma­tion is, first of all, a selec­tion: this, not that.
Here, utter­ance is not sim­ply an attempt at mutu­al under­stand­ing. Utter­ance is, first of all, the selec­tion of the expli­ca­tion of this selec­tion.
And Paul Wat­zlaw­ick already no longer meant by under­stand­ing that one had suc­cess­ful­ly reached mutu­al under­stand­ing. Under­stand­ing is, first of all, the selec­tion of hav­ing con­nect­ed to the selec­tions of infor­ma­tion and utter­ance.
Pre­cise­ly this real­ized fol­low-up com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the sure sign that we are deal­ing with com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So we do not ask:

Who or what com­mu­ni­cates?
But rather: Is com­mu­ni­ca­tion present — yes or no?
And that is exact­ly where the great uproar began in #Frank­furt in the face of this soci­o­log­i­cal school from #Biele­feld: “Oh dear: then com­mu­ni­ca­tion is con­tin­gent?”

Yes. That is the whole point. “Every­thing could be oth­er­wise. And there is almost noth­ing I can change.” What calls for expla­na­tion is not what is, but why it is not done dif­fer­ent­ly… Watch the News, or read your news­pa­per, with that ques­tion in the back of your mind ;-)

#DDOS a Man­i­festo by @sms2sms 🍄🤖🖐

claude shannon:

com­mu­ni­ca­tion = ((send)receive)

prob­lem: #noise

niklas luhmann:

com­mu­ni­ca­tion = (((expression)information)understanding)

prob­lem: #con­tin­gency

was war der wat­zlawitz von paul wat­zlaw­ick bei sein­er def­i­n­i­tion von #kom­mu­nika­tion?
#kom­mu­nika­tion = (((information(mitteilung(verstehen)