Niklas Luhmann: The Reality of the Mass Media (1995/2000)

“In The Reality of the Mass Media, Luhmann extends his theory of social systems — applied in his earlier works to the economy, the political system, art, religion, the sciences, and law — to an examination of the role of mass media in the construction of social reality.

Luhmann argues that the system of mass media is a set of recursive, self-referential programs of communication, whose functions are not determined by the external values of truthfulness, objectivity, or knowledge, nor by specific social interests or political directives. Rather, he contends that the system of mass media is regulated by the internal code information/noninformation, which enables the system to select its information (news) from its own environment and to communicate this information in accordance with its own reflexive criteria.

Despite its self-referential quality, Luhmann describes the mass media as one of the key cognitive systems of modern society, by means of which society constructs the illusion of its own reality. The reality of mass media, he argues, allows societies to process information without destabilizing social roles or overburdening social actors. It forms a broad reservoir (memory) of options for the future coordination of action, and it provides parameters for the stabilization of political reproduction of society, as it produces a continuous self-description of the world around which modern society can orient itself.

In his discussion of mass media, Luhmann elaborates a theory of communication in which communication is seen not as the act of a particular consciousness, nor the medium of integrative social norms, but merely the technical codes through which systemic operations arrange and perpetuate themselves.”

First published as Die Realität der Massenmedien, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995.

Translated by Kathleen Cross
Published by Stanford University Press, 2000
ISBN 0804740771, 9780804740777
154 pages

Key terms: mass media, second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis, Heinz von Foerster, autopoietic, Laws of Form, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, constructivist epistemology, Gregory Bateson, recursive, Spencer Brown, Katherine Hayles, Michel Serres, Baltasar Gracian, Amos Tversky, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, munication, Ludwig Tieck

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Scott Lash: Critique of Information (2002)

This penetrating book raises questions about how power operates in contemporary society. It explains how the speed of information flows has eroded the separate space needed for critical reflection. It argues that there is no longer an ‘outside’ to the global flows of communication and that the critique of information must take place within the information itself.

The operative unit of the information society is the idea. With the demise of depth reflection, reflexivity through the idea now operates external to the subject in its circulation through networks of humans and intelligent machines. It is these ideas that make the critique of information possible. This book is a major testament to the prospects of culture, politics and theory in the global information society.

Publisher SAGE, 2002
ISBN 0761952691, 9780761952695
234 pages

Key terms: phenomenology, Husserl, conceptual art, semiotic, information society, Heidegger, media theory, Derrida, Dasein, exchange-value, metanarratives, intellectual property, critical theory, dualism, intersubjectivity, ethnomethodology, ontological, reflexive modernization, dead zones, technoscience

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PDF (updated on 2013-4-16)