I want to know about any serious work in which society, or any
particular society, has been analyzed as an information processing
entity. I would be specially interested in any work which compares a
society to a computer or a brain. I am also interested in any work
which considers that a society itself (in a collective way, as opposed
to the individuals in that society) "learns", "reckons", "belives",
etc. Similarly, I am interested in works which treat society as having
conscious and unconscious information processing.

I am less interested in works which use these kind of analogies, but
do it mostly as a kind of poetic license. I want the works that take
these analogies seriously

Hello Octava,

               You have posted an important, currently open, 
 and I dare to say a deep question. 

The analogy  between society and organism
 has been around for a long time ( Cicero's classes, Freud's censor,
..),
 however during the last few decades the concept is considered to be
more
 than that, more then than analogy, by part of the research community.

 Premier site promoting this post-modern view is Principia
Cybernetica:
 http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html

 The discipline which studies the society and organism from the
 unified point of view is called Complex Systems:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy/Philosophy_of_Science/Philosophy_of_Physics/Complex_Systems/

 The fact that category is listed in 'Philosophy of Physics' rather
then in
 reflects the fact that the new concept of an 'abstract organism',
which can be a 'classical organism' (animal or human), an 'anthill or
behive, or a society (of organisms or complex machines (agents)) has
not been generally accepted by the scientific community. This
clasification used in google as well as other web directories
originated in ODP
 http://dmoz.org/about.html
 where the science part of the editor community so far resisted
proposals
 to move Complex Systems to Science or Science/Physics.

 The concept of the 'abstract organism' includes view of the
 planet Earth as an organism - the so called Gaia Hypothesis:
http://www.magna.com.au/~prfbrown/gaia.html

The information-processing aspect of such an 'organism' was first
formulated
by physicist Peter Russel:
http://www.peterussell.com/GB/Chap8.html

 whose book Global Brain is hereby recommended for further exploration
of this
 interesting topic:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-keywords=Global%20Brain&search-type=ss&bq=1/103-8979814-7875840

 Search terms were

 global brain
 complex ssystems
 Peter Russel
 memes and memetics 

       as apparent from the above text. If you came to think about
 this notion independently, your intuition and power of abstraction
 is  decidedly in the 'above average' range. Congratulations and happy
 explorations.  
  Hedgie

The answer was fast, informative and very generous. Thanks! I might
resubmit my question when I have assimilated all the suggested
readings.

I don't think this directly answers the "society as a computer" theme
of your question, so I have included it as a comment.

You may be interested in looking into Evolutionary Memes or memetics. 
Instead of looking at society as a computer, it looks at ideas as
organisms, subject to "survival of the fittest."  Where it relates to
your area of inquiry is that the playground for these "organisms" is
society's "collective mind."

Some memetics philosophy suggests the absence of free will (which
would not correspond to what you are investigating) while other
outlooks suggest that people have a capacity to accept or reject which
memes program their minds, in effect filtering the weak memes away
from the strong memes.

Memetics
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/
"Memetics is the study of ideas and concepts viewed as 'living'
organisms, capable of reproduction and evolution in an 'Ideosphere'
(similar to the Biosphere) consisting of the collective of human
minds."


Other sites:
http://www.memecentral.com/

I agree, important insite may come from your research. It might be
helpful to examine the propaganda ministry which Gobles ran for Adolf
Hitler 1938 to 1945 The world view of the German people evolved
rapidly durring this period. Some right wing experts think much of the
world is now being brainwashed by a great conspiracy of media
maniplation by the rich and powerful internationalists.  Neil

You may be interested to know that there is a movement called
extropianism or transhumanism that suggests (among other things) that
humanity is now in an exponentially increasing feedback loop with its
technology that will in the near future become something called a
"singularity", which may be described as when humans are no longer a
hive but instead a single organism.  Transhumanists are generally
heavily involved with memetics, which was described above.  More info
here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/lifeafterdeath/extropianism/index.shtml

Another way of looking at this is to focus on the concept of a
boundary itself.  Boundaries are not real in any sense, but are drawn
within our minds.  When is one object two?  When the Molecular bonds
are broken?  Magnetic bonds broken?  Marriage certificate torn in
half?  It's arbitrary, since everything is connected to everything
else in some sense by the simple notion that everything is in the same
Universe.

Have you ever been part of a group of people in some religious or
ritualistic event where the group became synchronised in some way, and
you experience loss of any forms or duality and become part of an
undifferntiated white light?  Some claim that this white light is
actually a benign multibeing entity, or some short term singularity in
the sense described above.

Another aspect of this is to look in the opposite direction
biologically.  There is a species of amoeba called Dictyostelium
Discoideum. These amoebae will live on their own, foraging for food.
Once it becomes scarce, they signal each other, and come together as
one. They form into a vehicle, a slug, and move to another food
source. Then some amoebae sacrifice themselves to form a solid stalk,
which the rest of the amoebae climb to the top of. They form a spore,
which then explodes and scatters all over the food, allowing them to
forage as individuals, once again. There's a lot of scientific
research all over the world on this creature's genes, with the hope of
understanding how multi-cellular life came about.  Read more about it
here:

http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~stan/Thesis/
http://dictybase.org/tutorial/about_dictystelium.htm

And search google for "Dictyostelium Discoideum"

The concept of the Collective Unconcious:
http://fusionanomaly.net/collectiveunconscious.html

Dissolving Boundaries:
http://fusionanomaly.net/dissolvingboundaries.html

Concrescence:
http://fusionanomaly.net/concrescence.html

Singularity:
http://fusionanomaly.net/singularity.html

I couldn't help adding a comment because I am immensely interested in
this subject as well.

Ellis