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

Publisher

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Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005–) [EN, ES]

“Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social’. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’ as used by social scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely’. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling: and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanation’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’ has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network-Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2005
ISBN 0199256047, 9780199256044
301 pages

Reassembling the Social (English, updated on 2012-7-17)
Reensamblar lo social (Spanish, trans. Gabriel Zadunaisky, 9 MB, added 2016-1-13)

Joe Karaganis (ed.): Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (2008)

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.

Publisher The Social Science Research, New York, 2007
ISBN 0979077222, 9780979077227
284 pages

PDF (updated on 2013-6-6)
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