Niklas Luhmann - The Reality of the Mass Media (1995)

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Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.

Niklas Luhmann

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.

Niklas Luhmann

The second-order cybernetics worked out by Heinz von Foerster is rightly held to be a constructivist theory, if no an a manifesto for operational constructivism. The reverse doesn't apply, however. Constructivist epistemologies do not necessarily have the rigor of a cybernetics of cybernetics. One can obeserve congnitions as constructions of an observer, without linking with this the theory that the observing observer observes himself or herself as an observer.

Niklas Luhmann

By representing themselves as a system [the mass media] generates boundaries with an inside and an outside that is inaccessible to them. They too reflect [or represent] their outside as public life, so long as specific external relationships, such as to politics or to the advertisers, are not in question.

Niklas Luhmann