These ideas here remind me of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication. Usually communication theories assume there to be a sender and a receiver, and the sender tries to transmit information to the receiver. Then that’s called communication. But in Luhmann’s theory there is no assumption of anything being transmitted. Instead, as far as I understand, he only assumes that people involved in communication react to “irritations” created by other people, and those reactions consist in creating further “irritations”. A feedback loop.
So a blog post may be seen as a search query, but it may also be viewed as an irritation, optimized for irritating a specific sort of other people enough such that they hopefully react with creating their own irritations. (I’m probably oversimplifying Luhmann’s theory here.)
“irritation” in the sense of “state-of-the-world which I can improve by contributing and which my feelings desire to be improved”, yeah? not necessarily that the desire to contribute has to have negative valence. if so, I wish Luhmann had chosen a different word, but I can see how my comment fits into the framework.
These ideas here remind me of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication. Usually communication theories assume there to be a sender and a receiver, and the sender tries to transmit information to the receiver. Then that’s called communication. But in Luhmann’s theory there is no assumption of anything being transmitted. Instead, as far as I understand, he only assumes that people involved in communication react to “irritations” created by other people, and those reactions consist in creating further “irritations”. A feedback loop.
So a blog post may be seen as a search query, but it may also be viewed as an irritation, optimized for irritating a specific sort of other people enough such that they hopefully react with creating their own irritations. (I’m probably oversimplifying Luhmann’s theory here.)
“irritation” in the sense of “state-of-the-world which I can improve by contributing and which my feelings desire to be improved”, yeah? not necessarily that the desire to contribute has to have negative valence. if so, I wish Luhmann had chosen a different word, but I can see how my comment fits into the framework.
Yeah. The German term has less of a negative connotation I guess. “Surprisal” goes in a similar direction.
hmm, perhaps compare programmer’s “building projects to scratch an itch”, or fiction writers’ “plot bunnies”.
I’m not deeply familiar with Luhmann’s work, though that was interesting. It does remind me somewhat of Bakhtin (and Buber) on dialogue.