Languaging in the Void

                When Maturana talks about objectivity, he brackets a lower- case o, like this: (o)bjectivity.  What he is trying to say is that everything said is said by an observer and that every observation is subject to verification through languaging with others.  There is no way to tell whether or not any particular observation is valid until it is confirmed by others.  Normally this happens in language games or realms of thought, such as science.  A scientific result isn’t considered valid until it’s replicated.  A theological principle carries weight when it reaches the level of doctrine or dogma.   We are constantly checking our versions of reality against and within a series of realms of languaging.  The confirmation doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but it legitimizes the utterance within the realm.  As Jarred Diamond pointed out in his book, Collapse, one way that cultures fail is to construct political processes that do not reflect the reality they face.

                I say all this to foreground the question of what impact technology has on the critical function of languaging.  If we are ‘coordinating the coordination of behaviors’ through languaging, what happens when the medium of coordination no longer can be depended on to be ‘real?’  By now we know that the Russians ‘hacked’ the 2016 election by using bots to flood social media platforms with fake information.  There are Chinese cell phone farms that are pumping out millions of messages from fake accounts that skew everything from Google searches to Facebook likes.  In an era where more and more people depend on the internet to get ‘information,’ what happens when an increasing amount of that information is cynically and artificially constructed and abused?             How are the coordinations of languaging that construct and ground our social existence being altered in this new environment?

                This isn’t entirely new.  Governments have historically falsified information.  Fox News exists to falsify information.  The Catholic Church has been at it for two millennia, and, of course, you can’t always trust your mother.  In these cases, there were/are always counter-hegemonies that gave perspective.  There were oppositional parties, other news sources and other churches, and your friends always helped straighten you out.  I don’t really see a balancing force to this new form of languaging.  Languaging to get information used to require work and human validation.  People used to have to judge the portals they went through to find something out and judge the people who gave them the information.  In this case, none of that is true.  The technology overwhelms the inbred balances we’ve developed to deal with face to face institutions.

                My point here is not to make some Neo- Luddite rant against social media (although there are days I think that might be justified).  My point is that our political coordinations of behavior are being manipulated in ways that threaten their ability to do the one thing they are designed to do – to help us language with others to create a viable and sustainable view of the world.  The search engines and algorithms of Google and Facebook, to say nothing of the cyber-warfare of the Russians and Chinese, make languaging democratically a difficult thing to do.  It has ushered in the era of the ‘Lie’ as a political weapon.  Saying something is true is more and more the same as making it so.  As Maturana says, none of this is trivial.  There is no way forward that doesn’t confront the questions about technology and languaging.  Whether the alternatives are educational or more limited technology, we have to find a way to sort through this problem.  Maybe the end of the world isn’t a bang or a whimper, but an infinitely blinking curser.