The Death of Newspaper in the Perspective of Autopoietic Systems Niklas Luhmann (Case Study of Sinar Harapan Newspapers)

Recently in Indonesia, the number of newspapers keep declining while at the same time, more online media emerge. One of the newspapers that has stopped publishing was the legendary evening newspaper Sinar Harapan, which stopped printing in 2016. This study aims to analyze the “death” of the evening newspaper Sinar Harapan from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic system. Luhmann considers mass media as an autopoietic system that must have certain characteristics in order to survive. This research using case study methods with history perspective. The data were collected using the literature study method. This research shows that the evening newspaper Sinar Harapan as an autopoietic system has to stop operating because of the complexity of the environment that Sinar Harapan cannot compensate for. Although Sinar Harapan has carried out an evolutionary process on the selection stage, it has failed to stabilize itself. On the other hand, Sinar Harapan also failed to carry out its function as a media system to always present novelties irritating the social system.

Bittorio revisited: structural coupling in the Game of Life

The notion of structural coupling plays a central role in Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition framework and strongly influenced Varela’s subsequent enactive elaboration of this framework. Building upon previous work using a glider in the Game of Life (GoL) cellular automaton as a toy model of a minimal autopoietic system with which to concretely explore these theoretical frameworks, this article presents an analysis of structural coupling between a glider and its environment. Specifically, for sufficiently small GoL universes, we completely characterize the nonautonomous dynamics of both a glider and its environment in terms of interaction graphs, derive the set of possible glider lives determined by the mutual constraints between these interaction graphs, and show how such lives are embedded in the state transition graph of the entire GoL universe.

Autopoietic System

This essay presents, first, a description of Niklas Luhmann’s notion of autopoietic system. Luhmann theorises society as a self-referential, differential, and posthuman communication system that constitutes meaning. Then, second, it defends Luhmann against the new materialist challenge that stresses the role of matter in meaning-making.

The Natural Medium as Carrier of Meanings and Their Decoding by Living Beings: Biosemiotics in Action

The synthetic, integrative significance of biosemiotics as a modern interdisciplinary research program is under discussion in the article. Aimed at studying the cognitive and life activity of living beings, which are capable of recognizing signals and extracting the meanings, biosemiotics serves as a conceptual node that combines some important notions of theoretical biology, evolutionary epistemology, cognitive science, phenomenology, neuroscience and neurophilosophy as well as the theory of complex adaptive systems and network science. Worlds of perception and actions of living beings are built in the process of co-evolution, in structural coupling and in enactive interaction with the surrounding natural environment (Umwelt). Thereby the biosemiotic theories developed by the founders of biosemiotics (J. von Uexküll, Th. Sebeok, G. Prodi, H. Pattie) are conceptually closed to the system-structural evolutionary approach developed in synergetics by H. Haken and S.P. Kurdyumov, the conception of autopoiesis (H. Maturana and F. Varela), second-order cybernetics (H. von Foerster), the conception of enactivism in cognitive science (F. Varela, E. Thompson, A. Noë). The key to comprehending the processes of extracting and generating meanings is that every living organism lives in the subjectively built world (Umwelt), so that its Umwelt and its internal psychic organization become parts of a single autopoietic system. According to the well-known expression of G. Bateson, information is a not indifferent difference or a difference that makes a difference. Differences become information when a cognitive agent as an interpreter, acting as part of an autopoietic system, sees signs in these differences that make meanings.