The Reality of the Mass Media (Cultural Memory of the Present (Paperback)) (Paperback)
$20.95 - Free shipping worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for The Reality of the Mass Media 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.
Full description- Publisher: Stanford University Press
- Published: 03 July 2000
- Format: Paperback 160 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Communication Studies | Popular Culture | Media Studies | Sociology | Social Theory
- ISBN 13: 9780804740777 ISBN 10: 0804740771
- Sales rank: 276,595
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Full description for The Reality of the Mass Media
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.
