The Reality of the Mass Media

by Niklas Luhmann, Kathleen Cross (Translation)

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.

Genres: Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Cultural, Social Science, Theory

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is increasingly recognized as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. While his theories have yet to make a major mark in American sociology, his theory is currently well known and popular in German sociology and has also been rather intensively received in Japan and Eastern Europe, including Russia. His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists. (p. xxvii Social System 1995)

Much of Luhmann's work directly deals with the operations of the legal system and his autopoietic theory of law is regarded as one of the more influential contributions to the sociology of law and socio-legal studies.

Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory. Like his one-time mentor Talcott Parsons, Luhmann is an advocate of "grand theory," although neither in the sense of philosophical foundationalism nor in the sense of "meta-narrative" as often invoked in the critical works of post-modernist writers. Rather, Luhmann's work tracks closer to complexity theory broadly speaking, in that it aims to address any aspect of social life within a universal theoretical framework - of which the diversity of subjects he wrote about is an indication. Luhmann's theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.

Luhmann himself described his theory as "labyrinth-like" or "non-linear" and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood "too quickly", which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to start this with a quote from Henry David Thoreau, that does not appear in this book, but that I think might help explain its point. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Thoreau was both right and wrong, and I don’t mean in particulars about the Princess and her ailments – but rather in the increase in trivia that passes as information that the new mass media would bring. But he was also wrong in assuming we would then see this trivia as being purely trivial – we are meaning makers, and so we make meaning.

I am often as outraged by the latest crass absurdity that Trump has dropped, turd-like, upon the floor of public debate (perhaps even as outraged as any New Yorker). I’m as horrified at the prospect that someone who changed their name to Boris out of shock value is likely to become British PM (perhaps even as much as any Londoner – Christ, if this is about to happen, maybe I’m even more outraged than those who voted him in as they Lord Mayor). I think all this concern for trivia that happens half a world away has much less to do with our having become ‘global citizens’ than with our falling for Thoreau trivia as if it really mattered.

Luhmann’s point is almost the opposite of Thoreau’s. Reality is now intimately tied up in what we learn from – and that we can only learn from – the mass media. I have no more power to confirm the true existence of two gentlemen named Trump and Johnson and their various wacky deeds than I have of flying to the moon, other than from what I’m told in the mass media. The fact I continue to believe that both men exist and are about to hold significant world power speaks both to my own credulity (if they are both real, what would fiction look like?) but also to the power of the mass media to sustain this ‘reality’ beyond what would otherwise be the overwhelming sense that someone, somewhere is pulling our collective legs.

The point is that the reality that we experience from the mass media doesn’t correspond to our ‘experience’ in our day-to-day lives and is certainly not ‘verifiable’ in any personal sense by us or any actions we might take outside of the mass media. This is not to say the ‘reality’ we receive from the mass media is a sham – it is just that it operates by rules that are not quite the same as the rules we use to judge other aspects of our lives.

One of those rules relates to the media’s demand for ‘information’ rather than ‘non-information’ – and that is, it demands information of a very particular type – information that makes a difference. As he says at one point in this, there is no real reason why ‘the news’ needs to have changed since yesterday – the key story of the hour yesterday might not have moved on at all in just 24 hours. You know, the compulsion for something different to have happened since 7pm yesterday evening barely makes sense in most real life situations, and so the expectation that in turning on the television at 7pm today and getting more ‘news’ about that things seems to be a bit of an odd expectation. Particularly when what we are anticipating is to receive information – that is, that what we are going to hear will be new, topical, to the point, and will also ‘move the story forward’. The idea that a ‘difference that makes a difference’ might have happened since the last news cycle (and that has decreased to far below the 24 hours in the last few decades) seems remarkably optimistic, but is actually one of the premises of the mass media in relation to ‘news’ and to the creation of ‘reality’ by the mass media.

The mass media is composed of three elements: one is ‘news’, another is advertising and the last is entertainment. These three interpenetrate each other, sometimes shifting from one to the other. As he says in the chapter on entertainment, he isn’t even looking at how ‘entertaining’ entertainment might be – he is more interested in the informational component of it, in much the same way as he was with the news. I think this might be the part that many people might object to more than what has been said already. He says that mass media that is read for ‘entertainment’ can really only be read once, at least as pure entertainment. This is because the plot twists and disclosures and resolutions are only entertaining when they are being revealed. To read a novel a second time allows one to enjoy the artistry of the writer, but not really to relive the entertainment value of the first time the story was told. And this he attributes to the change that has occurred since entertainment became part of the mass media – that, like the news, entertainment is about information. Like I said, people will likely argue with this notion – and I’m not even sure if I totally agree with it – but I think there is something to be said for it too.

He has certainly changed my mind on advertising. One of the things he says about advertising here that I think is terribly profound is that advertising isn’t about getting you to change your mind about a commodity, even to really just get you to buy it, but rather, advertising is mostly about just putting that commodity into your mind. I’m going to use his example of ‘kitchen renovations’. His argument is that an advertisement that makes you immediately reject (as if such a thing were even possible – to immediately reject something…) having your kitchen renovated, the ad has been successful in doing what would have been otherwise incredibly unlikely. That is, for the idea of you renovating your kitchen to have spontaneously popped into your head. You are much more likely to think your kitchen is looking dowdy if you are thinking about kitchen renovations, than if you are not thinking about kitchen renovations. And ideas in your head impact your world. Desire is only desire for what you do not have, so, desire is dissatisfaction. And you can only be dissatisfied with what you notice.

The news, then, is obsessed with information – and in fact, the news is nothing else but ‘information’ in the strict sense that it needs to add something new or it is not news. Entertainment is only possible on the basis of ‘information’ as in a difference that makes a difference in how the story is told – and advertising is interested in ‘information’ about difference too, since most of what is mass produced is, by definition, an undifferentiated mass, advertising has quite a job ahead of it then. Not least since it needs to both differentiate the undifferentiated, but also to encourage brand loyalty. That it, it needs to give you information that will say that ‘this is different enough for you to need to replace your old one, but it is also same enough that you should choose the latest version of your old one’.

The text became nearly impenetrable after this. I think the key idea is that the need for information, and therefore the limited ability of any piece of information to actually inform, produces a constant irritation within the system. In fact, it is this irritation that makes the system self-generating. That is, since the whole system constructs our reality, it is this ‘sand under the eyelid’ irritation of information that never fully informs, but that is ultimately responsible for our construction of reality. This is a horizon that constantly spreads, one we can never be satisfied with – one that forces our desire for more information. In fact, one that creates literally us even as individuals, much of the same form as news, advertising and entertainment are created – creating ourselves somewhat in their image to the extent that we seek to communicate our own stories about ourselves and these are therefore composed in the same way as stories in the mass media are composed.

This becomes quite hard going towards the end – that said, and knowing I probably only understood about 10% of the last half of the book or so – I think there is a richness of thought here that deserves more time than I am prepared to offer to unpack that richness.

[Melanie Page · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading this a second time, and with, admittedly, a lot more time and energy to put into it, I liked it even less than the first time. Luhmann uses key terms throughout the book that he doesn't define. It's as if we're supposed to know what he means. I assume that he's defined his esoteric terminology in previous books, but he cannot seriously assume that readers have encountered his entire collection of works. Also, some of the key terms he brought up in this book were used repeatedly from the beginning and THEN given his definition in the last few chapters. Basically, mass media is "society" (he's not using society like most people because society doesn't even INCLUDE people) and everything else is the "environment" (nothing to do with trees) outside of the mass media (his theory is that the mass media is a "system," also a term not defined). Things from the environment encounter the system every so often as "irritants" that can either be integrated into the system ("information") or kicked out ("non-information"). There is also quite a bit about observing others, observing self, and observing yourself observing others. Oy....

[aritchee mintea · Rating 1 out of 5]

i didn't understand anything. thank you

[THG_Dostvky · Rating 3 out of 5]

No añade nada nuevo a lo que se conoce como la mala praxis de la psicología social o, dentro del campo filosófico, a aquello que Marcuse tenía que decir de la mass media y la "desublimación de la cultura" en pro del dominio tecnológico. A mi juicio, no es más que la continuación de un argumento y la expresión de obviedades. Una lectura favorable para quien nunca se ha enfrentado a la realidad del control mediático sobre las personas (tanto implícita como explícitamente).

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic philosophy. A system similar to that of Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon. Applied to the media, it is most practical. Gilles Deleuze is an honorable mention.

“Reality is produced within the system by means of sense-making. It arises whenever inconsistencies which might emerge from the part played by memory in the system's operations are resolved”

“The more complex the system becomes and the more it exposes itself to irritations, the more variety the world can permit without relinquishing any reality - and the more the system can afford to work with negations, with fictions, with 'merely analytical' or statistical assumptions which distance it from the world as it is. In this case, however, every statement about reality is tied to system references which cannot be further generalized (transcendentalized). So our question now has the form: how do mass media construct reality?“

“The realty of a system is always a correlate of the system's own operations, always its own construction. It is the topics of communication which ensure that the mass media, in spite of their operational closure, do not take off, do not take leave of society. Topics are an unavoidable requirement of communication.' They represent communication's other-reference. They organize communication's memory. They gather contributions into complexes of elements that belong together, so that it can be discerned in the course of communication whether a topic is being retained and carried forward or whether it is being changed.“

“It cannot be a matter of finding out how the world is with the help of this system, however distorted and in need of correction it may be, and then making this knowledge generally available. This is how the system's self-description might proclaim it. Instead, a sociological observer trained in systems theory will describe that and how the system connects one operation to another in self-constructed temporal horizons, referring again and again to its own state of information, in order to be capable of discerning novelties, surprises and, therefore, information values.”

“The unity of the concept of information is broken down into two differences which are coupled to each other causally. This allows account to be taken of the fact that by no means every difference makes a difference. Both perception and language provide a surplus of distinctions; and even if it were to be limited to the differences actualized at any one moment, to what is being seen or said at this very moment, it is still much more than what is used for forming a difference in the premises of further operations. Perception focuses something specific in a context which is also held in view. Sentences use many words, many distinctions, in order to say something specific. But only those things which remain in the memory in the short or long term 'make the difference'.
This selective acquisition of information can only be grasped adequately as an achievement of the system, and that means, as a process internal to the system. The unity of information is the product of a system - in the case of perception, of a psychic system, in that of communication, of a social system. So one must always clarity which system is making these differences; or, with Spencer Brown, which system is carrying out the instruction 'draw a distinction' that generates every distinction.
If, in addition, one starts out from the theory of operationally closed systems of information processing, the generation of information and the processing of information must be going on within the same system boundaries, and both differences to which Bateson's definition is geared must be distinctions in the same system. Accordingly, there are no information transfers from system to system. Having said that, systems can generate items of information which circulate between their subsystems. So one must always name the system reference upon which any use of the concept of information is based. Otherwise it remains unclear what is meant at. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the information/ non-information code is its relationship to time. Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes non-information. A news item run twice might still have its meaning but it loses its information value.”

“The concept of irritation is also a part of the theory of operationally closed systems and refers to the form with which a system is able to generate resonance to events in the environment, even though its own operations circulate only within the system itself and are not suitable for establishing contact with the environment (which would have to mean, of course, that they are occurring partly inside and partly outside). This concept of irritation explains the two-part nature of the concept of information. The one component is free to register a difference which marks itself as a deviation from what is already known. The second component describes the change that then follows in the structuring of the system, in other words the integration into what can be taken to be the condition of the system for further operations. What is at issue here, as mentioned already, is a difference which makes a difference.”

“Every selection decontextualizes and condenses particular identities which in themselves have nothing identical about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. In other words, identity is only conferred if the intention is to return to something. But at the same time this means there is confirmation and generalization. That which is identified is transferred into a schema or associated with a familiar schema. It is marked and thereby confirmed, such that it is able to retain the same meaning for other uses in other situations. Every selection, therefore, is based on a context of condensing, confirmation, generalization and schematization not found in the same way in the outside world being communicated about, and this applies to everyday communication just as it does to the particular kind of communication of the mass media. This is what lies behind the assertion that it is only communication (or in other words, the system of the mass media) that gives facts or events a meaning.“

“It is taken for granted nowadays that an audience is capable of following this distinction of real and staged reality, and that it therefore allows certain liberties to be taken with representations, such as speeding cars, which it would never allow itself to get away with. Viewed historically, such an ability to distinguish is one result of an evolution that is nowadays traced back to the emergence of stage theatre in the second half of the sixteenth century.® In contrast to medieval performance practice, the idea in Renaissance theatre is no longer to make visible the invisible aspects of the world, not to bring things together again, to symbolize the visible and the invisible, but nor is it about any obvious confusion of game and reality (with the result that the audience has to be calmed down and kept from intervening). Rather, it is about an autonomous production which is experienced as merely being fake and which, moreover, rehearses once again within itself the game of deception and reali-zation, of ignorance and knowledge, of motive-led presentation and of generalized suspicion of underlying motives.“

“The mechanism of generating the text must not appear again in the text itself, because otherwise it would not be possible for self-reference and other-reference to be clearly distinguished.”

“A correspondingly open socialization, geared towards 'inner' values and certainties, appears to begin amongst the 'bourgeois' classes of the eighteenth century; today it has become unavoidable. No sooner than he is born, every individual finds himself to be someone who has yet to determine his individuality or have it determined according to the stipulation of a game.”

“They are offered cognitive and motivational freedom - and all this without any loss of reality! The opposition of freedom and coercion is dissolved. One can make a choice oneself and is not even obliged to stand by what one thinks of oneself if things get serious. Entertainment performances, therefore, always have a subtext which invites the participants to relate what they have seen or heard to themselves. The viewers are included as excluded third parties - as 'parasites', as Michel Serres puts it. The sequences of distinc-tion, which develop from one another by one providing the opportunity for another, make a second difference in their world of imagination - the difference to the knowledge, capabilities and feelings of the viewers.“

“This imitation/authenticity distinction does not adequately explain how the individual identifies herself within this bifurcation as an individual. This seems to happen in the mode of self-observation, or to put it more precisely, by observing one's own observing. If the imitation/authenticity option is given, one can opt for both sides or sometimes for one and sometimes for the other, so long as one is observing oneself and is looking to find one's identity therein. Reflection can only yield up a characterless, non-transparent I which, however, as long as its body lives and places it in the world, can observe that it observes. And only thus is it possible, in determining what everyone is for oneselt, to do without indications of background.”

“Topics, not opinions, are decisive. There is so much talk of the 'dying of the forests' that in the end we know that we do not know what the causes are, but we do know that there are a variety of opinions about it. In view of the complexity of topics and contributions, it is not even possible to allocate differences of opinion to fixed pre-given structures, such as class or ideological factions. We just learn to observe the observing and to experience the conflict itselt as reality, since differences are to be expected. The more information, the greater the uncertainty and the greater too the temptation to assert an opinion of one's own, to identify with it and leave it at that. What conclusions can theory draw from this description? We can rule out the possibility that the programme strands named above form their own, operationally closed function systems.”

“In people, then, a known or at least knowable past, at any rate one which is unchangeable, encounters an unknown future. People symbolize the unity of the known/unknown schema, interpreted through the temporal difference of past and future. They thus absorb, as it were, attentiveness to time, they serve as tangible symbols of time. They integrate past and future in their actions, and they have to be individual, that is, distinguishable, so that it becomes visible that this can happen in very different ways. But another aspect of this form of observation of time thereby remains unexplicated, namely, the fact that there might also be quite different ways of separating and reintegrating the past and the future, for example, by means of organization. Although this does not explain why these different forms of calling individual motives to account in the different programme strands have developed historically, a structure can be recognized.“

“In the feedback of the unity of the coded system into the system, the system achieves individual operations at most, but not itself. The system has to live with the suspicion of manipulation because this is how it develops its own paradox, the unity of the difference of information and non-information, and feeds it back into the system. No autopoietic system can do away with itself. And in this, too, we have confirmation that we are dealing with a problem of the system's code. The system could respond with its everyday ways of operating to suspicions of untruthfulness, but not to suspicions of manipulation.”

“Psychic and social systems empower themselves to choose. But this presupposes a recursively stabilized network of redundancies, that is, memory.”

“The cognitive system that we now call 'subject' might infer self-confirmation from every cognition (be it true or untrue), because in the end this is how it confirms its autopoiesis. But it is just this which no longer leads directly to confirmation of the reality value of the knowledge.“

“fundamentalisms of every kind develop under these conditions of communication. One can step up and say: this is my world, this is what we think is right. The resistance encountered in the process of doing this is, if anything, a motive for intensification; it can have a radicalizing effect without necessarily leading to doubts about reality.”

“The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non-transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge. This means, in other words, in the reproduction of future.”

“Obviously, the theory of operational closure of autopoietic systems does not say that these systems could exist without any environment. The suspicion of 'solipsistic' existences was always an absurd one and says more about whoever formulates it as an objection than about the theory being attacked itself. Certainly, cognitive systems are unable to reach their environment operationally, and so they cannot know it independently from their own structural formations. Nonetheless, there are structural couplings between autopoietic systems and systems in their environment which are compatible with autopoiesis. They do not bring about any determination of systems' conditions through conditions or events in the environment. Systems can only determine themselves, and this they can only do through self-generated structures. But massive and repeated irritations can still arise, each of which is then processed into information within the system. Viewed over the longer term, structural development is thus explained by the constant supply of irritations from certain sources - and by the lack of stimuli on the part of other segments of the environment. Maturana called this evolutionary tendency structural drift.“

“The schema allows for supplements and replenishments; it cannot be applied 'schematically'. Deviations come as a surprise because of the schema; they become conspicuous and thus imprint themselves on the memory. Schemata are instruments of forgetting - and of learning; they are limitations to flexibility which make flexibility within prestructured barriers possible in the first place.
As Kant taught us, schemata are not images but rather rules for accomplishing operations. The circle schema, for example, is not the depiction of any circle, but the rule for drawing a circle. The diversity given to the inner meaning in the form of time differences can only be reconstructed as procedures (also presupposing time) for purposes of knowledge. For Kant, this copying of time from the empirical over into the transcendental sphere was the reason why a relationship of similarity could be assumed in spite of the radical difference of objects and ideas.“

“A script is therefore an already fairly complex schema which also cuts out many things and presupposes both a stereotyping of events and a standardized coupling of their succession. If thing or person schemata are linked to a script, it also means that the observer is no longer free to choose between object schema and time schema or to let his or her gaze oscillate, but that object schema and time schema enter a relationship of mutual dependence where the one cannot be chosen without consideration of the other.”

“Anyone who adheres to ideas such as objective truth or psychically binding 'consensus' will not be able to accept this analysis and will accuse the mass media of superficiality, or even manipulation. If, on the other hand, one takes the individuality and the operational closure of autopoietic systems seriously, one will see that it cannot be otherwise. From the point of view of society, structural coupling mediated via schemata has the benefit of accelerating structural changes in such a way that, if this acceleration is successful, it will not break the structural coupling of media and individuals but will simply link up to other schemata. From the point of view of the individual, the advantage of schemata is that they structure memory but do not determine action. At the same time, they offer liberation from burdens that are too concrete as well as a background against which deviations, opportunities for action and constraints can be recognized.”

“What is presented to them affects them too, since they have to lead their lives in this world; and it affects them even when they know very well that they will never get into the situations or play the roles presented to them as factual or fictional. Instead, they can still identify with the cult objects or the motives which the scripts of the mass media offer them. When individuals look at media as text or as image, they are outside; when they experience their results within themselves, they are inside. They have to oscillate between outside and inside, as if in a paradoxical situation: quickly, almost without losing any time, and undecidably.
For the one position is only possible thanks to the other - and vice versa. The consequence must be that the individual must resolve this paradox for herself and construct her identity or her 'self' herself. minluned for this can be the usual ones.“

“In accepting this characteristic postmodern style the mass media are merely following what the form of social differentiation suggests. But with a constant change of perspectives, the observer who is performing this transformation with the before/after distinction still cannot be grasped.
'God is dead', they said - and meant: the last observer cannot be identified.
As a reaction to this finding, attempts have been evident for some years now to shift the problem onto ethics.“

“By leading us back to the paradox of the observer, second-order cybernetics overcomes the distinction of 'critical' and 'affirmative' still common amongst sociologists and intellectuals. This too is a distinction, that is, an instrument of observing. If we observe the one who with the aid of this distinction opts for the one side (and not for the other), a further version of the observer paradox emerges.
Whoever opts for 'critical' (as do most intellectuals) must have an affirmative attitude towards the distinction itself. Whoever opts for affirmative must accept a distinction which also allows one to adopt a critical attitude. This is why observers who choose this distinction must remain invisible. At best, they can say: I am the paradox of my distinction, the unity of what I claim is different.
The paradox offers the observer exactly the same concentration on a single point that cannot be condensed any further as does an autological, second-order cybernetics that includes itself...The distinctions we have been used to up to now, with the question of the observer, are identified as paradoxical, they are driven back to the question of the unity of the difference, in order then to have the question posed, which other distinctions are able to 'unravel' the paradox, to resolve it again. Treated thus, the paradox is a temporal form whose other side forms an open future, a new arrangement and a new description of habits as questionable. As also in autopoiesis, there is no final form which, either as origin or as goal, does not allow the question of the 'before' and the 'afterwards'.”

[Michael Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a description of genuine reality or human consciousness, an entertaining if not tortured read that repeatedly attempts to use multiple subjects and predicates within a single sentence, but is nevertheless beneficial here and there because it probes the meeting point of unbounded and bounded systems. It is generally speaking a peculiar application of systems theory to understanding the effects of media creation, publication and levels of human perception with intelligible repeatability. Luhmann assumes re-creation arises automatically, a biology term he imports into his work as "autopoiesis". A better description of mass media reality is sender/receiver, filter, bias, push/pull information exchange in more modern, straightforward terms -- which is itself a system. One interesting take-away is his expounding on this autopoiesis, which in turn includes the phenomenon of self-confirmation. What is wrong with this approach is that Luhmann is so certain of autopoiesis as an explanation of reality that he says that 1)Mass-media is how society secures knowledge of the world, and 2) self-confirmation conforms to autopoeisis. If you ever played the game Gossip when you were a kid, you immediately see where Luhmann is going. In the game Gossip, one person whispers the message to the next. There is no other interconnecteness involved that allows for self-correction. Many times the person at the end announces something totally garbled from what the first person whispered in the other's ear. Luhmann makes an interesting claim no doubt, but I would like to see the grounds for his clinging to autopoesis as a principle that all else depends since a system is by definition a type of order that has has an origin and does not happen by itself. Autopoeisis is a way of avoiding discussion of principia altogether in order to expound and describe observations in detached systematic language. "Other-reference" is merely a variation of "Self-reference"? What is his explanation for that claim? Luhmann frowns on "classical epistemology" as "dogma", and that is where he says there is "advantage"? How? Exported back into biological terms, autopoeisis could then be describing a mere self-replicating parasite. What I like about Luhmann is that he does cause you to think, but it is only intellectually entertaining and he is not a good recommendation for systems theory readers until mastery of classical epistemology occurs.

[Joana · Rating 1 out of 5]

So picked up this a bit driven by it's title and thinking it would give me a bit more insight in relation to how the mass media operates, it's role in the society, etc. I definitly made a mistake there, because these book assumes that you are familiar with a lot of terms and concepts that most people are not.

It also uses a quite (unecessary) complicated language to explain things that could be explained a lot more easly. This seems to me to be a bit pointless and obnoxious. As Einstein would put it: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

In general, I found it very hard to finish this book, probably many concepts were left to understand and I did not find it a pleaseant/interesting or enlightening reading...I was just plain boring...

[Andrew Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very complex book. It is only 122 pages of actual reading, and looks like it can be tackled in a day. It was assigned reading for a course I took. I think without the aid of the professor, I would not have been able to grasp the lessons of the book.

I think the difficulty lies in the idea of reality, which was outside of my range when I picked up the book. Once the ideas are explained, and the idea of a social system is set up, the book become much clearer. Like anything that is a struggle, in the end, I greatly valued the book.

[Laura (laurascozyreads)]

"Wenn man Gäste hat und ihnen Wein einschenkt, wird man nicht plötzlich auf die Idee kommen, die Gläser seien unerkennbare Dinge an sich und möglicherweise nur als subjektive Synthese vorhanden. Vielmehr gilt: Wenn schon Gäste und wenn schon Wein, dann auch Gläser."

[Mfalco65 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those postmodern delights that is almost impossible to understand on first read. However, behind the complex strands is a very simple and useable analysis of how society works. It may provide the best roadmap for evaluating, analyzing and resolving the many problems we face today.

[Kale · Rating 5 out of 5]

My god, one of the nerdiest shit I’ve ever read. In fact, Luhmann basically restructures sociology, which in my opinion has MANY problems. His recursive theory is incredibly insightful: the data sociology collects and then turns into statistics often explains nearly nothing.

For Luhmann, information is recursive. Information generates more information, forming sub-systems built from external sources. The craziest part is that these systems are all binary. You either agree with something or you don’t. That also includes codes like legal/illegal, true/false, and so on.

But in the real world, people walking their dogs in the park do not care about highly cited empirical studies in cynology (the study of canines). People care about vibes. Information is just information unless a system picks it up and does something with it.

Climate change is a great example of this. The science is there, the empirical evidence is there, and yet we still project opinions onto it because of other recursive systems. We can’t agree on climate change not because the facts are unclear, but because of sub-system thinking. Each person lives inside a web of overlapping systems that produce recursive information:

- fear of economic downfall if climate change is taken seriously
- mistrust of the government
- apathy
- “I just want cheaper power”
- “I care about the environment,” etc.

Whether someone accepts or rejects climate change is shaped by how this new information aligns or doesn’t align with their existing systems. These binary acceptance/rejection patterns are themselves recursive and, in a way, Hegelian-esque as synthesis of our time, constantly being produced.

I haven’t talked much about the book itself, but I think his theory in general is great. In a Kantian sense, Luhmann suggests that we only ever access “facts” through constructed descriptions. At the end of the day, information is just information, but information does change the structure of systems. Reality becomes second-order: what matters is how observers observe.

The media, for Luhmann, just describes history at a rapid pace. He’s surprisingly neutral about “media manipulation.” The primary function of the media is to bombard society with stories and force it to adapt to constant changes. It operates under its own distinct code of information/non-information, driven by the need for constant novelty and the obsolescence of repeated content.

Mass Media's purpose is just to exist. Rapidly feed you information, and hook you like a cheese burger. Align with the systems you have constructed, and boom, you're fallen into an ideological trap.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Em primeiro lugar precisamos deixar claro que este livro, A Realidade dos Meios de Comunicação, de Niklas Luhmann, embora tenha sido publicado no Brasil pela editora Paulus em 2005, ele foi escrito em 1994, portanto, no início da popularização da internet. Assim que os estudos sobre os meios da comunicação acabam bastante datados, já que ele os divide em três tipos notícias e informação, publicidade e entretenimento. A internet, por sua vez, abrange os três tipos de funções dos meio de comunicação descritos por Luhmann. É, ao mesmo tempo, informacional, publicitária e de entretenimento. Nesse sentido, o livro é datado, mas quando toma os meios de comunicação como um todo, seus pressupostos podem ser bastante utilizáveis também nos dias de hoje. Quando ele fala da realidade dos meios de comunicação, não fala apenas de como os meios de comunicação são em realidade, ou seja, de suas funções e impactos, mas também sobre que tipo de realidade eles veiculam através das mensagens e formas como passam essas mensagens. Neste sentido, o livro é atualíssimo e vale a conferida.

[Mitchell Chatfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plastic Pills was right to say this theory is extremely unsexy. This is not at all an easy read - not for its Hegel tier difficulty, but to stay awake and follow Luhman’s points. Perhaps as a first exposure to systems theory this would be shocking to read, I did not find it so. The style was often oscillatory - sometimes remarkably formal/academic, and at other times almost pub-talk and ‘near enough’. After page 15-20 I continued not for enjoyment but because I had started.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es gibt von Luhmann bessere Werke, in denen er die Systemtheorie für konkrekte soziale Systeme entfaltet (z. B. Liebe als Passion). Dies dürfte mit der Genese des Werks aus einem Vortrag zusammenhängen.
Für die 5. Auflage sind mir doch zwei sehr drastische editorische Nachlässigkeiten aufgefallen.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Luhmann's books I read. It's page count is deceiving; not being familiar with Luhmann's terms of reference meant it it took a great deal of time to slowly work through this making sure I got each concept right. It's very easy to get lost. It's a very interesting thesis on the kinds of communication that broadcast media make possible, and the kinds of social phenomena this entails. The book is as much an statement on epistemology as it is a thesis of mass media theory. The basic idea is that the mass media is a part of society which is functions to construct a selection of observations about society as a whole. The selectivity of these observations, the rapid refresh of information, and the organization of topics allows further communication to proliferate throughout society along narrowed lines without getting overwhelmed by a complexity of possibilities.
I'm not sure how readily it can be applied to media in the internet age, where dissemination of communication is no longer centralized to the same degree, and the audience's ability to respond is no longer so technologically interrupted.

[Hendrik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite theoretical, not much of practical interest.

Extremely annoying that the 2009 edition is still using old spelling rules.

[Cali · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential framework to analyze the reality of construction and the construction of reality by the mass media as an autopoietic system.