Web-based groups as autopoietic social systems. A cybernetic perspective

This article proposes innovative theoretical tools to describe the socio-evolutionary process characterised by the interaction between new media and societal capacity to handle complexity in the temporal dimension and in the social dimension. The innovation proposed with this article stems from the interdisciplinary combination of contributes from classic works in the fields of theory of forms, second order cybernetics, and the theory of autopoietic systems. The article presents, and applies, its theoretical innovation by discussing how internet-based social formations produce borders of meaning and how they reproduce their identity, that is, the difference between them and the environment over time, as the outcome of their own operations.
The article’s ambition is to present innovative theoretical observations of web-based groups as: 1) bounded interaction systems, as forms in the medium of the social networks, organised as tight couplings of elements, users' profiles, that are loosely coupled in the medium, 2) social systems that produce themselves as the output of their own operations, creating a border of meaning by condensing a distinction between actual communication, and possible communication. This, at the same time, will count as an example of the condition of individuals in modernity, where there is always a border of meaning that interacts with the social dimension and the temporal dimension.