Dissemination media handle the improbability of a communication reaching the addressee. It is improbable that communication reaches people who are not physically present [→Interaction].
To disseminate communication beyond the boundaries of an interaction requires a particular technology that makes dissemination media available. Dissemination media desynchronise utterance and information on the one hand and understanding on the other, so that understanding can take place later than utterance. Thus, dissemination media amplify the possibility to generate a social memory [→Time]. They also amplify the possibility of rejecting communication [→Symbolically Generalized Media], as they overcome the constraints of physical presence and reach a much greater number of participants. They have two important effects on society: (1) they are important presuppositions for internal structural change, and (2) they transform the nature of communication.
Historically, the first medium of dissemination was writing. It enabled communication to overcome the boundaries of oral communication and brought about important changes in society in general. While oral communication occurs in the medium of acoustic perception, written communication introduces a symbolization in the medium of visual perception: it implies new operations (writing and reading) in which the distinction between sign and sound is replaced by the distinction between syllable combinations and meaning. With the invention of writing, the distinction emerges between two forms of speech perception: on one side, the written form guarantees that many addressees will be reached; on the other side, oral communication takes on new relevance due to the availability of written texts.
An important effect of writing is the spatial and temporal separation between utterance and understanding [→Communication], which opens up a great many possibilities for recombining (e.g., many people can read what has been written) and reorganizing communication sequences. Writing establishes a social memory, independent from the memory of individuals. Writing also creates the illusion of simultaneity in the case of the non-simultaneous and allows, in the present, the combination of many presents that, for each other, are the past or the future. In what is written and what is read, it is possible to describe a present that is in fact in the past for the current present (of the reader), or a future with respect to which the present is in the past. Ultimately, writing makes second-order observation [→Operation/Observation] and reflexivity (writing about writing) [→Self-Reference] easier: since written texts are available for reading and re-reading, communication more readily becomes the object of further communication. Communication sequences no longer require a strict reciprocity between the participants: the writer is alone and has the time and the opportunity to process her suggestions selectively and to take into account the communication partner’s need for comprehensibility. This leads to important transformations of →Semantics in society.
The advent of writing triggered a differentiation in society, was the starting point of the evolution of ideas, and increased the possibility of the communication being rejected. Many centuries later, these effects were strengthened enormously with the invention of the printing press. The printing press allowed the wider dissemination of written texts, promoting the standardization of language in large geographical areas (national languages). This led to the emergence of the requirement for reaching unlimited numbers of addressees.
The enormous increase in the number of readers radically changed communication. Before the invention of the printing press, writing served only as the social memory of pre-existing knowledge and oral communication remained essential. With the introduction of printing, the processes started by writing increased enormously the reach of written communication, the possibilities of spatial and temporal differentiation of communication, the probability of the communication being rejected, and the changes of semantics in society. The function of the printed book is not to store knowledge, but to broaden it and to produce new, original knowledge. The printing press makes the existing semantics observable and places this above the necessity to dispose of outdated knowledge that has been superseded. The printing press means that writers can no longer observe individuals in an audience, so that they must orient themselves exclusively to the interest and relevance of the text in society. However, printing also enhanced individualized participation in communication, introducing the importance of dealing with individual ignorance (not knowing what is printed) and individual dissent and interpretation (about what is printed).
Like the reader, the narrator also becomes invisible as an individual and the text becomes more and more autonomous. Triggered by the printing press, society made the transition from a hierarchical to a heterarchical order – from a stratified to a functionally differentiated society [→Differentiation of Society]. In the functionally differentiated society, the dissemination media developed further, which again supported the change towards a heterarchy.
The dissemination media that emerged in the functionally differentiated society are above all telecommunications: from radio, to cinema and television, to telephone and telefax. The evolution of telecommunications emphasizes the medium of visual perception and tend to remove the spatial and temporal limits on communication. In addition, communicating in moving images means that every reality can be reproduced with a guarantee of faithfulness to the original. Media such as the cinema and television combine visual and acoustic perception so that the world can be communicated as a whole. When the images and sounds of the world are directly communicable, we need not (and cannot) continue to differentiate between utterance and information—and when information and utterance are no longer differentiated, communication (which nevertheless takes place) becomes invisible. Thus the question arises of what can still be distinguished as communication.
A further important effect of telecommunication (excluding the telephone) is the establishment of one-sidedness in communication (the person speaking does not listen; the person listening does not speak). The utterance is no longer a selection within communication, but rather a selection for communication: whoever produces the utterance chooses the themes, forms and times for a one-sided communication. The situation is similar for understanding: the person listening and watching chooses what to hear and see. As such, selection is no longer based on the coordination of utterance and understanding: these are becoming more and more separate. With this separation, comes the loss of the self-correction mechanism of “traditional” communication: a participant listens to what another participant says and answers, then the other participant must take this answer into account, and so on.
The newest technological development is the computer as a medium. This medium allows the differentiation of, on the one hand, entering data into the communication and, on the other hand, requesting information. As in the case of writing, there is no unity between utterance (here, data entry) and understanding. Unlike for writing, however, the unity of information is also missing: the person producing the utterance does not know how the computer will process the data entered. This technological development intensifies and accelerates communication in the →World Society, both amplifying communication (i.e., enhancing its unpredictable forms) and restricting it (i.e. making its source, the invisible machine, inaccessible).
The new dissemination media have radically broadened communication possibilities. Today, there is nothing that can be left out of communication. The influence of dissemination media on society is very important. First, the evolution of dissemination media creates a progressive societal change, from hierarchical organisation based on direct contacts, to heterarchical organisation, in which the public opinion is important (in the press and above all on television) and the authority attributed to “experts” is undermined (on the internet). Second, this evolution determines a growing discrepancy between actual and potential communication and a stronger compulsion to select. The dissemination media go on to develop their own selectivity, which affects the content of communication and communication possibilities: the topics of communication must be adapted to the selection of whatever can be communicated “well” by the technologies of the media. Finally, with the evolution of dissemination media, society becomes more and more dependent on technology, which determines the structural coupling [→Interpenetration and Structural Coupling] with its environment, with increasing risks of failure and costs for safeguards against failures. [C.B.]
The Form of Writing (1992); The Reality of the Mass Media (2000); Theory of Society (2012: Ch. 2.2-2.8).
Baraldi, Claudio, Giancarlo Corsi, and Elena Esposito. Unlocking Luhmann; Luhmann in Glossario. I Concetti Fondamentali Della Teoria : A Keyword Introduction to Systems Theory. transcript Verlag, 2021. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48859, p 71–74.