Digitality as a Medium of Communication : With a Focus on Organizations as Systems of Decision-making
The paper proposes to distinguish the technology of computing-networks from a medium of digitality. It draws on Niklas Luhmann’s thesis, that the information of mass media is produced outside the technology of dissemination. The central concept will be that of redundancy. By algorithmic data processing digitality establishes forms of unambiguousness within redundant patterns, thereby emitting an undesignated side of ambiguities. Thus the medium of digitality is defined by the code unambiguousness/ambiguousness. Referring on the theory of social addresses, the final sections describe why (and how) organizations (and not persons) are the first addresses to realize the forms of digitality. The case of Big Data could serve as a test of the thesis.