Theoretical Background
In 1960, Karl Popper posed a question.
“The problem with the validity of empiricism may be roughly put as follows: is observation the ultimate source of our knowledge of nature? And if not, what are the sources of our knowledge? "\cite{popper1960}
Popper would later go on to argue that what separated the reason of a madman from that of a scientist was that a scientist can test his assertions. \cite{popper1974} But what happens when he cannot? What happens when we live in a world that changes so fast that by the time papers are written on issues, they are already obsolete?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his blue and brown books, argued that we decide what means what through "language games"\cite{wittgenstein1958}.
While one may speak english or Spanish or french, Wittgenstein refers to more specific "languages" such as geometry, chemical symbols, and the use of charts and diagrams. However, his examples largely dealt with simplified one-to-one interactions. What happens when hundreds, or even millions of people are speaking at once?
Another german philosopher, Niklas Luhman, created a robust model to understand how groups decide on meaning. He called it " the social system". He argued that that the primary goal of a social system is to reduce complexity\cite{Luhmann1967}. As humans, we do not have the time and ability to process all of the information on the world around us.
For Luhmann, meaning is the product of the different choices that a system makes to deal with complexity \cite{Luhmann1990}. Meanings spread across and through social systems through communication. Social systems can have sub-systems within them and they can be reflexive, modifying themselves \cite{Luhmann2014}. To rephrase, Meaning is the product of the self-regulation that a system undergoes in order to cope with novel complexities: pending the preexisting mechanisms -and, hence, limitations and capabilities - of said system. In other words, meaning is an emergent effect of a system’s autopoetic self-maintenance.
According to Luhmann, systems begin with a minimal ability to reduce complexity, but evolve to be able to deal with more complexity, \cite{Luhmann2000}. By reproducing itself through communication, the system constitutes and reconstitutes itself \cite{Bausch1997}.
What I will do in the rest of this paper is use Luhman's conception of a social system as the foundation of a model that can be used towards understanding how people decide what things mean on the internet. A millennial, online forums, wikis, and blogs, are some of the first places I look when I want to know what something means. This paper will focus specifically on Reddit, an online forum, but hopefully, the model and the tools to use it can be applied to other sites.
I am not the first to apply Luhmann’s social systems theories to digital media. Federico Farini in “Media Theory and Web-Based Groups as Social Systems”, explores how social media fits into Luhmann’s systems theory, and how a desire for social inclusion can limit communication on Facebook \cite{Farini2017}.
If meaning is the product of different choices that a system makes, how the choices are made becomes the critical point to consider. I now present two different way that these choices might be made- the Simplicity Loop and the Complexity Loop.