Information, meaning, and communication: an autopoietic approach to linking the social and the individual

This paper considers the relations between information and meaning, as generated through the interactions of individuals, and communication, at the level of society, from an autopoietic perspective. It draws on earlier work concerning first, the nature of information and its relation to meaning via embodied cognition; and, second, a classification of organizationally closed, or self-referential, systems. The contribution made in this paper is to link these analyses at the level of the individual up to the social system of communication (based on Luhmann's work) utilising structuration theory.