Are mass media dissemination media because ∵ **they break down the boundaries of interaction and their broadcasts can be received everywhere**? Or are they success media because ∵ **their reductions, schematizations and generalizations can be assumed by everyone**? Is it, especially in the case of electronic mass media, a "medium of perception" because ∵ **one hears and sees their audio-visuals**? Or is it a "medium of representation" because ∵ **language is used to make the world accessible**? Or are mass media "action media" because ∵ **they drive the masses to the ballot boxes or to the department stores** (on these three types of media, cf. Seel 1998, p. 356)? Or all of them together – audiovisual entertainment, linguistically formulated news, and advertising that at least promises to motivate its addressees to act (Luhmann 1996, p. 51)? Or does Luhmann also confess to the mediality of "world development" claimed by Seel (Seel 2003, p. 12), when he states in his "dictum", which is now read here once again, one last time in a different direction: "What we know about our society, indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media" (Luhmann 1996, p. 9).
This "We" leads the readers a little bit on the ice, because "we" are indeed involved in the communications of the mass media insofar as "we" observe them and they give rise to psychic operations. The mass media themselves, on the other hand, reproduce their operations in the environment of consciousness systems. Thus, their self-legality cannot be understood by studying individuals. One has to observe the communication system to describe the reality of mass media, but not the millions or billions of subjects. Thus, despite the "we" of the first sentences, Luhmann is not concerned with "us," because "we" do not communicate, and the famous first sentence of his treatise might more precisely read, "What society knows about society, indeed about the world it constructs, it knows through the mass media" (Luhmann 1997, p. 1106). "Society observes itself in the mass media and thus produces its reality, the reality of society" (Luhmann 1997, p. 1096 ff.). This does not exclude that mass media provide mental systems with information, schemata and scripts (Luhmann 1997, p. 1106), on the contrary. One knows from advertising that only a BMW is a BMW and "schematically" adjusts to the fact that the driver behind you is about to flash his lights or overtake on the right (Luhmann 1996, p. 94). One may recall Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis: "That the difference between the Chrysler and the General Motors series is basically illusionary is already known to every child who is enthusiastic about difference" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986, p. 131). Luhmann could take up this view of the critics of the mass and culture industry insofar as he, too, is convinced that the mass media, in cooperation with the economy, produce, standardize, publicize, and enforce differences (Luhmann 1996, p. 94). However, unlike the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Luhmann does not believe in a "psychotechnique" of the media that uses "behaviorist" means to turn recipients into a mass that can be remotely controlled by "signals" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986, p. 173 ff.). Luhmann cannot share these assumptions, if only for epistemological reasons, because what the "addressees" of mass media "think, feel, desire" cannot be determined or even observed on the sender side (Luhmann 1996, p. 92).
Sender and receiver, to use these old-fashioned terms of the transmission model of communication, are separated "by interposition of technology." Because of this "interruption of contact" (Luhmann 1996, p. 11), **the two sides are left with only one thing to do: observe themselves**. The reality of the mass media is therefore first and foremost also its own reality, the self-construction generated by it and with its own means.
Luhmann's sociology observes communications - not people. Again and again he tries to explain that there is no other way: Whoever "realistically realizes what it would mean, if one wanted to start to determine the concrete states of consciousness of certain (many, all) individuals at a certain point in time, the impossibility of such an undertaking" will immediately become clear. However, refraining from describing people as elements of society does not do anything bad to people, but just so "takes individuals empirically seriously as individual human beings with bodies and consciousness, with memory and momentary sensibility" (Luhmann 2000, p. 283). If, on the other hand, media philosophers, in a decided orientation against "system-theoretical approaches," want to "investigate interactions between individual human beings" (Vogel 2003, p. 114 f.), then they would have to have an answer to what individuality is actually worth to them, because in fact it only plays a role as a generalized abstractum, but not as a psychophysical system that occurs billions of times, but is singular in each case.
Because systems theory observes communications instead of individuals, it breaks in many respects with the tradition of introduced concepts of media. It drops the model of intersubjectivity because it exclusively describes the "inter-", namely as communication and locates the empirical subjects in the environment of society. Because communication systems are also taken seriously, namely as autopoietic, self-controlling and reproducing systems, instead of being given to the "individual human beings" as tools, prostheses, instruments, transmission channels or means in a serving position or, vice versa, If we assume that the media are to be used to control and dominate human beings as subjects (sensu subiectum), systems theory cannot share all those fears that assume that the media have a manipulative influence on subjects that can be controlled causally, but also not those hopes that the media establish a new, virtual, global agora in which citizens conduct a deliberative discourse. A conversation, a discourse, an interaction or even a manipulation, control, conditioning - all this does not take place in the mass media. The mass media of systems theory reproduce their "own structures and operations only with their own products" (Luhmann 1996, p. 208). And these are communications, not individuals.
The book The Reality of the Mass Media deals solely with that reality which is generated in the mass media. This reality is nothing but an "internal correlate of the system operations" of the mass media - and not the reality of the economy, politics or science (Luhmann 1996, p. 19). What a first-order observer takes to be the selection and transport of given data appears at the level of second-order observation as a construct generated according to internal rules. This thesis is always formulated against the Frankfurt School and its students, who always present criticism of the manipulations of the mass media under the assumption that they themselves have always escaped them (cf. on this self-exemption in mass media criticism Bartz 2007).
Even if the "mirror" between information giver and information receiver is intransparent and "willingness to broadcast and interest in broadcasting" cannot be centrally coordinated anywhere (Luhmann 1996, p. 12), communications can still be observed on both sides. The broadcasters generate constructions of reality that become all the more stable the more the broadcasters observe each other and coordinate their scripts, formats and topics. And the recipients? They learn from the observation of other information consumers what one has to take note of "highly selectively. The fact that SpongeBob is a must in Berlin kindergartens is not something newcomers learn from television, but from the fact that they are cut 'in the living world'. One can deplore this as the power of television; or one can see in it evidence of the great degrees of freedom of media users who choose a particular program as a reference for their everyday communication - and reject all other offers.
Whether advertising, news or entertainment - in each case it is a matter of generating selective meaning, which can then be assumed as background to others. A common feature of all three branches is the generation of communication preconditions that no longer have to be communicated, since they can be assumed to be known (Luhmann 1996, p. 120). Every child can know who SpongeBob is, and will possibly be careful not to admit that he or she does not know. The result is a memory of society whose achievement lies in "the fact that one may presuppose certain assumptions of reality as known in every communication without having to introduce and justify them specifically in the communication" (Luhmann 1996, p. 121). The media thus provide a "background reality" (Luhmann 1996, p. 173) that replaces Husserl's and Habermas's lifeworld concept. Not the lifeworld, but the media create a reality of objects that can then be expectedly "presupposed in further communication. It would be far too risky to rely primarily on contracts or on normatively enforceable consensuses" (Luhmann 1996, p. 178). Selection offers can thus be based on the expectation that communication will succeed that draws on knowledge generated and disseminated by mass media (Luhmann 1997, p. 1104). Luhmann's media not only cash in on the lifeworld, but also on social theories built on normative or contract theory. The question of the everyday constitution of meaning, for which in Jürgen Habermas and also in Andreas Reckwitz, whose book Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne already indicates in its title the Habermas succession, the lifeworld, increasingly formed by media, is responsible (Reckwitz 2017, p. 238), is taken over by Luhmann, but answered in a completely different way: it is the mass media that do exactly what, for Habermas, the lifeworld-anchored claims to validity do: they make it probable that mutual insinuations lead to connectable communication. The situation of double contingency is not resolved by the mass media with a consensus, but Luhmann was never interested in that. In order to communicate, it is sufficient to remark on an offer: "So have I heard, and do in part believe it" (Luhmann 1996, p. 9).