APPENDIX TO SEVEN CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES AND OBIT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GLOSSARY

The University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary :: mass media

keywords cross references _____________________ Common sense Poetics mode speech Rhetoric form perspective map perception sound sign Kitsch representation affect spectacle spirit digital Affect mimesis spectator mind logic Time time analog face immediate body kitsch film painting Digital create immediacy language movement information transmission space image land voice aesthetics Memory ear landscape

Works Cited

Notes

1. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2008 Oxford University Press. 23, Jan 2008.

2. Luhmann, Niklas. The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

3.Peters, John Durham. “Mass Media,” in Critical Terms in Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in preparation (2008).

4. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of a Typographic Man. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1962

5.Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

6. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.

7.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

8. Plato, trans. Jowett, Benjamin, The Republic of Plato, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1947.

9. Adorno, Theodor W. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Media Studies: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1982.

10.Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

11.Kaplan, E.A. Rocking Around the Clock: Music, Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1986.

mass media

Mass Media: “With sing. or pl. concord (usu. with the): the main means of mass communication, such as television, radio, and newspapers, considered collectively.”1

The first recorded usages of mass media as a term was in 1923, in Advertising & Selling. Here, mass media is loosely defined as “represent[ing] the most economical way of getting the story over the new and wider market in the least time.”1 The etymology of the concept is crucial in understanding “mass media” as it is composed of two, highly nuanced words. Media generally defined, is, “the main means of mass communication, esp. newspapers, radio and television regarded collectively; the reporters, journalists, etc., working for organizations engaged in such communication.”1 Mass can be defined as, “a large number of human beings, collected closely together or viewed as forming an aggregate in which their individuality is lost.” 1 Important to note is the social honus on “the masses,” as a congregation, they are more than neutral “populace, the ordinary people, esp. as viewed in an economic or political context.”1

Yet Nickolas Luhmann elaborates on the concept, mass media are “those institutions which make use of copying technologies to disseminate communication.”2 Luhmann captures the “efficient” or “economical” aspect of mass media. Media are anything, “provided that they generate large quantities of products whose target groups are yet undetrermined.”2

Mass media itself, and the information it conveys, even in a mutlimedia setting, must be widely acessible. Peters identifies three key dimentions that transition a medium to a form of mass media, “address, avaibility and access.” 4 Futhermore, “mass media do not traffic only in mass address: they may destine messages to all, some, few or no one in particular.” 4

Mass media in enduring essence, throughout the evolution of mediums is, “openly addressed content, expanded delivery in terms of durability in time and/or transportability over space, and the suspention of interaction among authors and audiences.” 4 While McLuahn cites Gutenberg’s invention of the printing-press in 1456 as the “big bang” of sorts in communication and culture, theorists such as Peters cite “all communication” as “mass commication.” 5,4 In this conception mass media has been extent since the invention of writing circa 5000 B.C.E. and grew with the invention of the alphabet circa 2000 B.C.E. 6 As Luhmann implied in his more general definition of mass media, the ability to mechanically reproduce information is essential to creating a culturalmass media. 2Mass commincation, and thus the general trend of mass media has been one of increasing efficiency, accesability and reach.

Mass media is universally recognized as wielding great influence, but there has been great debate over its effects, source and control. For McLuhan, mass media is certainly a step closer to his ideal, “global village,” he writes, “might not the current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?” 7 Certainly, a network of streamlined and widely available information creates a broader social consciousness, especially where mass media is conducted through various channels, “the hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born,” it is a “moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them.” 7 Thus described, mass media brings the promise of awareness and unity—“media is the extension of man,” it is the “triumphant expansion of the self,” and thus McLuhan’s mass media must be the extensions of many men converging and communing. 7 His point is that “once we have surrendered our sense and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” 7 Yet this is a positive, our fragmentation as individuals in the West has been, “voluntary and enthusiastic,” and brings man closer to total “translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information.” 7

Benjamin would view mass media as the manifestation of the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” 8 Like his opinion on the reproduction of art, mass media, achieved by reproduction, can, “ meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced,” and leads to “a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of contemporary crisis and the renewal of mankind.” 8 In a Bejaminian sense, mass media allows for personal experience of information, and a personal renewal. Benjamin writes that, “the adjustment of reality to the masses, and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope,” that content is determined not simply by nature but by historical circumstance. Content of mass media is by this definition a product of the contemporary culture and the indiviual.

Luhmann writes that the interruption of direct contact, which occurs with mass media, ensures “high levels of freedom in communication.” 2 Mass media is a filter, “whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through mass media.” 2 Additionally, he raises: “we know so much about the mass media that we are not able to trust their sources.” 2 But for the “mass daily flow of communications it is” actually “impossible” in Luhmannian terms to know the truth of a given broadcast, as he defines mass media as an observing system that is only capable of, “distinguish[ing] between self-reference and other reference,” and “cannot simply consider themselves to be the truth.” 2 Luhmann asserts that as the world is “incomprehensible” and “inaccessible,” and thus there is no other alternative than to create mass media that constructs a reality. By this logic, the shadows on wall of Plato’s Cave, then, are the only means of grasping the real forms, they are not mere illusions but tools for as actual an understanding that humans can achieve. 9 Luhmann determines that the fact that we, the individual, cannot control mass media is beneficial, “the organizations which produce mass media communication are dependent upon assumptions concerning acceptability,” leading to a standardization and variety of information untailored to the individual. This effect is precisely how the “individual participants have the chance to get what they want, or what they believe they need to know in their own milieu from the range of programs to offer.” Thus, the mass media is the only reality we have and the only reality we can conceive.

Adorno fervently asserts that mass media is an out-cropping of “mass culture,” or “the culture industry” and that “the world wants to be deceived.” 10 Despite “the social role,” he elaborates that the function of something is no guarantee of its particular quality.” Mass media has a “monopolistic character,” that seeks to “streamline” and “ in so far as the culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, and human beings are once more debased,” replacing conformity with consciousness.” 10 The effect of mass media is industry is “one of anti-enlightenment” it is “mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness.” 10

Deep suspicion of the agent behind mass media resonates in Adorno, “typically mass media are the playthings of institutions,” thus Marx and Marxist theorists such as Adorno take it a step farther, determining that the “culture industry” creates products and information tailored for value, and consumption by the masses, and these products, “to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption.” The masses, here, are a secondary “object of calculation” and an appendage to the machinery. 10

The political and cultural impact of mass media is unmistakable from whatever prespective. Fashion, political campaigns, and war are migled with mass media spin. The rise of Nazism and Fascism, which Bejamin and Adorno experied first hand, certainly would not have been possible without propoganda in all mass media forms. Mass media and control have been extensively explored through literature in such Dystopian novels as Brave New World by Adolos Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell. These novels bring up the concept of survelliance, and mind-control through various media. Both works contain a sort of “Big Brother” constantly watching and brainwashing the easily suscepticble and unquestioning masses.

The concept of mass media itself was not codified in writing until the early 20th century, the significance of the timing provides support for arguments that mass media helps to deinfe the modern period in the West. 10,11 As technology progressed, displacing, complementing and augmenting new forms, McLuahn and others cite the expansive quality of media advancements, such as moveable type, into other froms of larger-scale communication such as newspaper, the radio which rose to fame in the 1920’s, disemminating information through transmissions, and the Television which was commercially avalibe in 1930 and became ubiquitous by the 1950’s spreading information by broadcast. 6

Mass media is seen by and as a direct output of a capitalist democracy, and an essential component in the maintaing of a centralized government. 10,11 An era of “democritizarion” of a media itself is taking place on the new frontier of mass communication: the Internet. Anyone who has acess to the technology and the skills to operate a computer can provide content. There is an increasing “mass” use of the internet for information dissemination. It is an avenue not considered by many of the main media theorists simply beause the internet was not yet a reality in their time. Grassroots campaigns, blogs and YouTube appear to creating not only a national, but an international forum. An icon and great-thinker in the realm of Pop Culture, Andy Warhol has said, “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” and there is great validity to this concept when applied to the Internet today. Even amatures with an opinion can provide content, and many do: 44% of U.S. internet users have contributed information to the Internet.

Whether McLuhan predicted the coming of the Internet as part of some “global village,” or if technological advance is simply a vast manipulation, driven by the commercial as Adorno would attest, this much is clear: the Internet is changing everything—from methods of mass media, to Media theory, to our culture, and to the self. Foucault writes that history is a “wave like sucession of worlds.” This technological wave of the internet is opening up a brave new one and the character of mass media is changing daily.

Lila NewmanThe University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary :: mass media

— 3 years ago

MASS SOCIAL ENTERTAINMENT

life under electronic conditions

by benedikt koehler< MEASURING BLOGS: THE NEW, THE BEST, THE ODD, THE LINKED AND THE FORGOTTEN SOCIAL MEDIA IS USING US >

From social to mass media?

Niklas Luhmann, the famous German sociologist who popularized sociological systems theory, distinguished mass media from other media by the fact that there is no interaction among the participants. This interaction is more or less explicitely locked out by technical means. And in the few cases, where there really is this kind of interaction - think of the letter to the editor - it will be carefully staged and marked as an exception.

Social Media are different. They explicitely allow for interaction. Even more than that: their technology calls for interaction. The Twitter crisis showed the problems that appeared when interactivity had been selectively shut off. A social media service that only is able to broadcast and not to interact, is not social media.

But does Luhmann’s distinction really hold for social media? There has been an intense debate about the friendship paradox: Having more and more contacts or friends is a strong incentive because it means more information and more influence. But at the same time, if you are passing a critical number (how large is it?) you are not able to respond to your friends or contacts anymore.

You are beginning to transform a social medium into a mass medium. You cannot interact with the participants anymore, although this is not caused by technology but by sociology.

With Luhmann you could assume that this switch from social media logic to mass media logic also would imply the following changes:

knowing your contacts will be superseded by presumptions and allegations
your audience is becoming vague
increasing your reach will be increasingly a strong objective
the mass medial code “information vs. non-information” will be your guiding line, which implies e.g. that you cannot present the same information twice
finally, when looking at the big picture, one of your functions will be to keep society awake, to irritate and surprise

What do you think? Do mass medial bloggers, twitterers, friendfeeders really exist and “operate” this way?

rated 4.0 by 2 people [?]

You might like:

Social Network Analysis: Going to Become Too Ubiquitous for Its Own Good (Forrester Information and Knowledge Management Blog)
$10 for Crying Out Loud (Blum Interactive Media)

— 3 years ago

MASS ENTERTAINMENT

Luhmann, “Entertainment” http://faculty.uwb.edu/cbehler/teaching/coursenotes/luhmannent.html

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Luhmann, “Entertainment”

In: Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford University Press, 2000. pp. 51 -

62.

Unfortunately there are a number of mistakes in the translation. I’ve corrected them and

indicated where (see: corr.CB).

In now coming to consider mass media ‘entertainment,’ we are getting into quite a different

kind of programme strand again. Here too, it is only the theoretically based issues which

interest us. We are not concerned with the nature of entertainment or with how

entertaining it is; we are not concerned with its quality, nor with differences in how

demanding or otherwise it is; nor are we concerned with the idiosyncrasies of those who

need entertainment or who simply enjoy being entertained and would miss it if it were not

there. It is certainly true to say that entertainment is one component of modern leisure

culture, charged with the function of destroying superfluous time. However, within the

context of a theory of the mass media, we shall stick to problems concerning the

construction of reality and to the question of what kind of effects the coding

information/non-information has in this case.

We are best served here by taking the general model of the game as a point of orientation.

This will also explain to us why it is that sports programmes, especially where replays are

concerned, count more as entertainment than as news.[1] A game, too, is a kind of doubling

of reality, where the reality perceived as the game is separated off from normal reality

without having to negate the latter. A second reality is created which conforms to certain

conditions and from which perspective the usual ways of living life appear as real reality.

The constitution of a game requires a time limit that is foreseeable in advance. Games are

episodes. They are not transitions to another way of living. People are only preoccupied

with them from

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time to time, without being able to relinquish other opportunities or to shed other burdens.

But that does not mean that real reality exists only before and after a game. Rather,

everything that exists does so simultaneously. The game always contains, in each of its

operations, references to the real reality which exists at the same time. With every move it

marks itself as a game; and it can collapse at any moment if things suddenly get serious. The

cat jumps onto the chessboard.[2] The continuation of the game requires that the

boundaries be kept under constant surveillance.

In social games involving several partners, this will happen by means of an orientation to a

set of rules which people have in mind when they identify their own and others’ behavior

(within the game) as appropriate. Behavior both in accordance and in conflict with the rules

is part of the game; but behavior which breaks the rules is only allowed as long as it can be

corrected by being pointed out. Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different kind of

game.[3] It does not assume complementary behavior on the part of a partner, nor any

rules agreed prior to it. Instead, the excerpt of [corr.CB] reality in which the second world is

constituted is marked visually or acoustically—as a book, as a screen, as a striking sequence

of specially prepared noises which are perceived as ‘sounds’ in this condition.[4] This external

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frame then releases a world in which a fictional reality of its own applies. A world!—and not

merely, as in social games, a socially agreed sequence of behavior.

This difference to social games brings us back to the system of the mass media. Just as in a

game, so entertainment too can assume that viewers are able to observe beginning and end

(unlike in their own life) because they experience things beforehand and still do afterwards.

So they separate out, automatically as it were, the time of entertainment from the time

which affects them themselves. But entertainment itself is by no means unreal (in the sense

of not being there). It certainly does presuppose self-generated real objects, double-sided

objects so to speak, which facilitate the transition from real reality to fictional reality, the

crossing of the boundary.[5] These are texts or films. On the ‘inside’ of these objects the

world of the imagination is to be found, invisible in real reality. This world of the

imagination, because it does not have to coordinate the social behavior of the observers,

does not need any game rules. Instead

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it needs information. And it is precisely this which allows the mass media to construct a

programme strand called entertainment, on the basis of their information/non-information

code.

Moreover, in entertainment, not everything should be fictional, especially when the story is

told as a fiction. The reader/viewer has to be put in a position very quickly to form an

appropriate memory, one that is tailored to the story. [corr.CB] And he or she can only do

this if provided with sufficient familiar details along with the pictures or the texts. Diderot

made this point repeatedly.[6] What is demanded of the reader/viewer, therefore, is a

trained (and yet, not consciously handled) capacity for making distinctions.

If these preliminary theoretical decisions are accepted, the problem then concentrates on the

question of how, with the aid of information (instead of prescribed rules), a special reality of

entertainment can be marked off. [corr.CB.] The answer to this question turns out to be

more complicated than might at first appear.

Let us reiterate that information consists of differences which make a difference. The

concept itself, then, presupposes a sequence of at least two events which have a marking

effect. But then the difference which has been generated as information can in turn be a

difference which makes a difference. In this sense, items of information are constantly and

recursively linked together in a network. They emerge from each other, but can also be

arranged in their sequentiality with regard to more or less improbable results. This can

happen in the strict form of a calculation (or a ‘reckoning’), but also in processes which, from

one step to the next, include other non-programmed information. In other words, it can

happen in processes which only reveal that further items of information are required, and

which these are, once the result of a particular piece of information processing has become

apparent. In this case, we will be given the impression (no matter whether or not the

process itself describes itself in this way) that what we have is not a calculation but rather a

sequence of actions or decisions. It is only in the narrative context that it becomes clear what

an action is, how far it extends into its past and into its future and which of the actor’s

characteristics are part of the action and which are not. Reference to other actions is

indispensable for every constraint on the meaning of a single action—in everyday life just as

in stories.

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This version of the problem of information presupposes that there are ‘subjects’, fictional

identities which produce the unity of the story being told and simultaneously facilitate a

conceptual leap to a (likewise constructed) personal identity of the viewer. The latter can

compare the characters in the story with himself.[7]

But that on its own does not justify viewing this kind of production of information

generated from information (distinctions generated from distinctions) as a game or as

entertainment. It presupposes further that the sequence of operations which process

information generates its own plausibility itself. As is similar in the case of technologies, a

closure of the process occurs in the face of uncontrolled environmental influences. Whatever

has made a difference then adequately accounts for which further differences are possible.

[corr.CB.] In this sense the process generates and transports an uncertainty, which it itself

produces and renews again and again, and which depends upon further information. It (the

process) lives off self-produced surprises, self-constructed tensions, and it is precisely this

fictional unity that is the structure which allows real and fictional reality to be distinguished

and the boundary from one realm to the other to be crossed.[corr.CB]

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.[8] 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 realization, of ignorance and knowledge, of motive-led presentation and of generalized

suspicion of underlying motives. Individuals are thus at liberty to interpret their own life

situations accordingly. Above

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all, however, the schema of expecting there to be a difference of appearance and reality in all

social relationships comes to be a fixed part of a culture which in turn, with no further fuss,

can then assume and build upon the fact that this is taken as given.

It is possible to find literature still in the seventeenth century which takes this to be so

remarkable that it draws attention to it specially, indeed virtually offers it as a product of

individual learning and of the art of sophisticated living.[9] However, this way of reading

reality becomes so rapidly widespread via the printing press that the mass media (then in

the process of taking shape) can count on it and, if anything, have the problem of mobilizing

ever new interest in it.[corr.CB] The element of tension already mentioned, of generating

and dissolving a self-created uncertainty, will have been useful for this.

It is the modern novel which provided the model with the greatest impact in this respect.

The novel is clearly itself a product of the mass media and their calculated effect upon an

audience. It is possible to read off from a key figure like Daniel Defoe that the modern novel

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arises out of modern journalism, and this on account of the need to distinguish facts and

fictions with regard to printed publications. The printing press changes the way in which the

world can credibly be presented to an audience, namely by asserting facts or writings which

have actually been discovered (but are recognizable as fiction), through to purely

undisguised fictional stories which nonetheless contain enough familiar material to be able

to count as imagined reality. That the distinction of news or in-depth reporting (both of

which can be proven to be factual) and sufficiently realistic fictional stories comes about at all

is down to technology, which enables printed products to be manufactured.[10]

It is this distinction which enables fictional literature’s loose link to reality and its larger

liberties to be used to tell stories which, while fictitious, nonetheless allow readers to draw

conclusions about the world they are familiar with and about their own life.[corr.CB]

However, because what happens in the stories is fictional, those points of reference are left

up to the individual, although the range of possibilities is based on a general structure which

underlies every kind of entertainment, namely the resolution of a self-induced uncertainty

about how the story will end. Epic elements were already

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being eliminated during the course of the eighteenth century, and there was an acceleration

of the plot, which is held up only by the intrigues generated within the novel itself. This is

why planning a novel requires a reflection of time in time itself. The perspective is

future-oriented, and therefore suspenseful and exciting. At the same time, however, an

adequate past must be provided to explain at the end how the uncertainty is resolved by

information which had already been introduced but whose function had not been realized.

One has to be able to return to something in order to close the circle. However

future-oriented the plot is, ‘the knot is untied only by the past and not by the future’ (as Jean

Paul instructs the novelist [11]). If the story aims to satisfy certain basic requirements for its

own consistency (and fairy tales are a much discussed exception here), the way it unfolds

must be able to refer back to the beginning of the story. In any case, the elements needed

for resolving the tension have to be introduced before the end, and only the reader or

viewer is left in the dark. This is why it is not worth reading something twice—or it is only

worth doing if the reader wishes to concentrate instead on admiring the writer’s artistic skill

or if someone watching a film wants to focus on the way it has been produced and directed.

For a text or story to be suspenseful and entertaining, one must not know in advance how

to read it or how to interpret it. People want to be entertained each time anew. For the same

reason, every entertainment must come to an end and must bring this about itself. The

unity of the work is the unity of the difference of future and past which has been placed in it.

We know at the end: so that was it, and go away with the feeling of having been more or

less well entertained.

By generating and resolving uncertainty of its own accord, a story that is told becomes

individualized. This is how there can always be something new of interest in spite of the

stereotypical repetition of the way stories are produced. The reader or viewer does not have

to be told to forget as quickly as possible so that new things can be written and sold, as

Ludwig Tieck asserts;[13] rather, this happens of its own accord as each element of tension is

individually built up and then resolved.

In order to be able to generate and sustain tension, one has to have the author stepping

back behind the text, because inside the

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text he would be someone who already knows the ending or who at any moment can make

things turn out just as it suits him. Every trace of his involvement has to be erased.[14] 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.[15] Although entertainment texts also have an author and are communicated,

the difference of information and utterance must not appear in the text—if it did, the

discrepancy of constative and performative textual components would come to light and the

attention of the one engaged in understanding would be drawn to this difference and

thereby diverted. He would waver and have to decide whether he should pay more

attention to the utterance and its motives or indeed to the beauty and connotative intricacies

of its poetic forms,[16] or whether he should just give himself over to being entertained. For

entertainment means not seeking or finding any cause to answer communication via

communication. Instead, the observer can concentrate on the experience and the motives of

the characters who are presented in the text and in this respect learn second-order

observation. And since it is ‘only’ a matter of entertainment, the problem of authenticity

does not arise, which it would in the case of a work of art. As an art form, then, the novel

departs from the sphere of entertainment around the middle of the nineteenth century, with

Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, with Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and gives it over to

the mass media. Indeed, twentieth-century art can no longer be described as fictional at all,

since fictionality presupposes that we can know what the world ought to look like in order

for the fiction to be able to count as a correct description of the world.[17] It is precisely this

description, however, which is systematically boycotted in modern art—and, as we can say

once more, is left to the mass media which thus fulfil the requirements for entertainment.

As is always the case with operational closure, differentiation generates surplus possibilities

in the first instance. Forms of entertainment therefore differ according to how these

surpluses are reduced. The basic pattern for this is the narrative, which in turn has

differentiated itself into a considerable abundance of forms. Apparently there are only a few

functional equivalents to this (always

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from the perspective of entertainment and not, for example, of art). One example would be

competitions of all kinds, such as quiz programmes or broadcasts of sporting events. We do

not need to go into detail here, but the question remains as to how this imaginary variety of

events is linked back to external reality.

It seems that knowledge which viewers already have must be referred to copiously. In this

respect, entertainment has an amplifying effect in relation to knowledge that is already

present. But it is not oriented towards instruction, as with news and in-depth reporting.

Instead it only uses existing knowledge in order to stand out against the latter. This can

come about when the individual viewer’s range of experience—always random—is

exceeded, be it in terms of what is typical (other people are no better off than I am) or in

terms of what is ideal (which, however, we do not have to expect for ourselves), or again in

terms of highly unlikely combinations (which we ourselves luckily do not have to encounter

in everyday life). In addition, it is possible to engage body and mind more directly—for

example, where erotica is concerned, or detective stories which initially mislead the viewers

to know they are being misled, and especially foot-tapping music. Precisely by being offered

from the outside, entertainment aims to activate that which we ourselves experience, hope

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for, fear, forget—just as the narrating of myths once did. What the romantics longed for in

vain, a ‘new mythology’, is brought about by the entertainment forms of the mass media.

Entertainment reimpregnates what one is anyway; and, as always, here too feats of

memory are tied to opportunities for learning.

Films in particular use this general form of making distinctions plausible by having

distinctions arise sooner or later within the same story. They condense them even further

by including distinctions which can only be perceived (not narrated!). The location of the

action, its ‘furniture’, is also made visible and, with its own distinctions (elegant apartments,

speeding cars, strange technical equipment etc. ), simultaneously serves as a context in

which action acquires a profile and in which what is said explicitly can be reduced to a

minimum. One can ‘see’ motives by their effects and can get the impression that intentions

behind actions are only a part of the whole series of events and that those engaging in

action do not

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have a clear idea themselves of what they are doing. Almost imperceptibly viewers come to

understand themselves as observers of observers and to discover similar or perhaps

different attitudes within themselves.

The novel itself had found its leitmotifs in the bodies of its protagonists, especially in the

barriers to the controllability of bodily processes.[18] This explains the dominance of the

erotic and of dangerous adventures in which the reader can then participate voyeuristically

using a body-to-body analogy. The tension in the narrative is ‘symbolically’ anchored in the

barriers to controllability of each reader’s body. If the story is also filmed or broadcast on

television, these emphases on the erotic and on adventure do not need to be changed; but in

pictures, they are capable of being presented in an even more dramatic, complex and

simultaneously more impressive way. They are also complemented in specific ways—for

example, by time being made visible through speed or by boundary situations of bodily

control being presented in artistic film components and in sport, through which boundary

cases the problem of the sudden change from control to lack of control becomes visible. This

is why sports programmes on television (as opposed to the results which one can read) are

primarily intended for entertainment, because they stabilize tension on the border of

controlled and uncontrolled physicality. This experience makes it clear in retrospect how

difficult, if not impossible, it would be to narrate the course of sporting events—of horse

races through to tennis matches. One has to go there oneself or watch it on television.

The artistic form of the novel as well as fictional forms of exciting entertainment derived

from it count on individuals who no longer draw their identity from their background but

who instead have to shape it themselves. [corr.CB] 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 ‘of which neither

he nor anyone else back to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the

stakes’.[19] It is extremely tempting

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to try out virtual realities on oneself—at least in an imagination which one can break off at

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any time.

The form of narrative entertainment gained as a result of the novel is no longer the sole

dominant form today. At least since television became widespread, a second form has

appeared alongside it, namely the genre of highly personal experiential accounts. People are

put before the camera and asked all kinds of questions, often with interest focused on the

most intimate details of their private lives. Whoever agrees to get into this kind of situation

can be assumed to be willing to talk; the questioner can proceed freely and the viewer can

enjoy feeling no embarrassment whatever. But why?

It seems that interest in such programmes lies in being presented with a credible reality, but

one which does not have to be subject to consensus. Despite living in the same world (there

is no other), viewers are not expected to join in any consensus of opinion. They are at liberty

to agree or to disagree. 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.[20] The sequences of distinction, 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. The issue here is not what impression the text, the programme, the

film makes on the individual viewer. And neither can the effect be grasped with the simple

concept of analogy formation and imitation—as if one were trying out on oneself what one

had read in a novel or seen in a film. One is not motivated to align one’s own behavior (this

would quickly place too much strain on one’s own capabilities and, as we know, would look

ridiculous).[21] One learns to observe observers, in particular, looking to see how they react

to situations, in other words, how they themselves observe.[22] At the same time, as a

second-order observer one

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is cleverer but also less motivated than the one whom one is observing; and one can

recognize that the latter remains largely nontransparent to himself—or, with Freud, not

only has he something to hide, but he is for himself something that remains latent.

What goes on in each individual viewer, the non-linear causalities, dissipative structural

developments, negative or positive feedback messages etc. triggered by such coincidental

observations, can simply not be predicted; neither can they be controlled by programme

choices in the mass media. Psychological effects are much too complex, much too

self-determined and much too varied to be capable of being included in communication

conveyed via the mass media. What is meant here, rather, is that every operation that goes

on in the fictional sphere of the imagination also carries with it an other-reference, that is,

the reference to real reality as it has always existed—known, judged and always having

been there as the topic of normal ongoing communication. And it is above all this

orientation of the distinction of real and fictional reality that produces the entertainment

value of entertainment communication. The ‘trick’ with entertainment is the constantly

accompanying comparison, and forms of entertainment are essentially distinguished from

one another in how they make use of world correlates: confirming or rejecting them,

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uncertain of the ending right until the very last moment or calmly with the certainty that:

that kind of thing cannot happen to me.

Psychic systems which participate in communication through the mass media in order to

entertain themselves are thus invited to make the connection back to themselves. This has

been described since the eighteenth century by the distinction of copy and authentic ‘being

oneself’,[23] and there are certainly imitational selfstylizations which are more or less

unconscious, whose widespread existence can only be explained in this way—for example, a

gesture of casualness or of brashness, expressing autonomy in the face of expectations. But

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

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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 oneself, to do without indications of social

origin.[corr.CB]

This discussion has made plain the special contribution of the ‘entertainment’ segment to the

overall generation of reality. Entertainment enables one to locate oneself in the world as it is

portrayed. A second question then arises as to whether this manoeuvre turns out in such a

way that one can be content with oneself and with the world. What also remains open is

whether one identifies with the characters of the plot or registers differences. What is

offered as entertainment does not commit anybody in a particular way; but there are

sufficient clues (which one would find neither in the news nor in advertising) for work on

one’s own ‘identity.’ Fictional reality and real reality apparently remain different, and

because of this, individuals remain self-sufficient, as far as their identity is concerned. They

neither must nor can communicate their identity. Therefore, they do not need to commit

themselves in any particular way. But when this is no longer required in interactions or

when it fails time and again, one can resort instead to materials from the range of

entertainments offered by the mass media.

In this way, entertainment also regulates inclusion and exclusion, at least on the side of

subjects. But no longer, as did the bourgeois drama or the novel of the eighteenth century,

in a form which was tied to a typified expression of emotion and thus excluded the nobility

(not yet having become bourgeois) and the underclass. Rather, it does so in the form of

inclusion of all, with the exception of those who participate in entertainment to such a small

extent that they are unable in certain cases to activate any interest and have, through

abstinence (often arrogant abstinence), become accustomed to a Self that is not dependent

upon it and thus defines itself accordingly.

Notes

[1] It is different, of course, in the case of the dry recounting of winners and losers and the

corresponding positions on points.

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[2] The reference is, of course, to the specially trained ‘Kopulier-Katze’ (‘copulation cat’) in

Jean Paul, ‘Die unsichtbare Loge’, Werke, ed. Norbert Muller, vol. 1 (Munich, 1960), pp. 7-469

(28ff).

[3] The objection might be raised that the game concept is only being used metaphorically

here, as one might speak of language games, for example. Very well, but metaphor is very

often an intermediate stage in the development of general theory. One might just as well

say: there is a general theory of the game, of which social games merely represent a special

case.

[4] Jacques Derrida discusses the ambivalent status of this marking (it is part of and not part

of the game, it cannot be played), in The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987), pp. 37ff, using

Kant’s critique of the power of judgement and of the unresolved problem in it of the

parerga, the frames, the ornaments.

[5] Lennard J. Davis writes about the difficulties with the evolution of this (initially quite

implausible) distinction in relation to the emergence of modern journalism and the modern

novel in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983). At the same time,

incidentally, modern statistics emerges, based similarly upon being able to distinguish the

real reality of individual cases and the fictional reality of statistical aggregates.

[6] ‘Let me tell you that it is upon this multitude of trivial things that illusion depends’, as it

says, for example, in Richardson’s eulogy, quoted from Diderot, OEuvres (Pleiade edn; Paris,

1951), pp. 1089-1104 (1094).

[7] We owe the invention of this form of ‘inferential entities’—both of the novel and of one’s

own real life—to the eighteenth century, to a curious dual development in the epistemology

of Locke via Berkeley to Hume and Bentham as well as in the novel. It has reached its end in

the art form of the novel and now seems to be reproduced only as a form of entertainment.

On the eighteenth century and on reforms of the prison system in England inspired by it,

based on ‘narrative’ biographies, and stimulated by literature, see John Bender, Imagining the

Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago,

1987).

[8] Of the many historical treatments of theatre, cf. in particular Jean-Christophe Agnew,

Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge,

l986). The links between the development of the market and that of the theatre in England

in the sixteenth century, which Agnew seeks to prove, could also be illuminating for the

connections between advertising and entertainment in the modern system of the mass

media. What is involved in both cases is the fact of manipulation which is illusory but is

nonetheless seen through, and the individuality behind it which controls itself and has access

to its own motives and interests, rather than simply living and suffering through the course

of nature or creation. When reformulated in a systems-theoretical way, this parallel of

market and theatre is ultimately based on the fact that differentiation frees up individuality

and forces it into self-regulation.

[9] For many of these, see Baltasar Gracian, The Critick (London, 1681)

[10] Cf. Davis, Factual Fictions.

[11] See Jean Paul, ‘Regeln und Winke fur Romanschreiber’, °Ë 74 of the ‘Vorschule der

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Asthetik’ (ch. 2 n. 11), p. 262.

[12] On the other hand, the feeling of having wasted one’s time with entertainment comes

from a different world, the Puritans’ world of spiritual pastoral care and of business sense.

See the treatment, rich in material, by Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton,

1970), esp. pp. 52ff.

[13] See Ludwig Tieck, ‘Peter Lebrecht: Eine Geschichte ohne Abenreuerlichkeiten’ (Peter

Lebrecht: a story withoot adventures), in id., Frnhe Erzahlungen und Romane (Munich,

n.d.), p. 136. The novel itself pursues the goal of dispensing with tension (‘adventures’) 3 in

order to be readable more than once as a ‘good’ text. As far as I am concerned: to no avail!

[14] On this point, see Schwanitz, ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Kommunikation und

Bewßtsein’ (ch.7 n. 2).

[15] The same applies to the modern ‘ideologies’ which were emerging at that time, as Davis,

Factual Fictions, pp. 212ff, shows. It seems generally to be the case, then, that the latency of

the mechanism of generation has a function of facilitating a clear division of self-referential

and other-referential references in the texts disseminated by the mass media.

[16] As described e.g. in Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of

Poetry (New York,1947), or in Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Ind.,

1978). Incidentally, this too is a reference to the differentiation of the system of the mass

media and that of art.

[17] This criterion in Christoph Menke-Eggers, Die Souveranitat der Kunst: Asthetische

Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 71 [tr. The Sovereignty of Art:

Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)], following M. C.

Beardsley, Aes􀀀thetics: Problems in the Theory of Criticism (New York,1958), p.414. ;

[18] On this topic in general, see Alois Hahn and Rudiger Jacob, ‘Der Korper als soziales

Bedeutungssystem’, in Peter Fuchs and Andreas Gobel, eds, Der Mensch - das Medium der

Gesellschaft? (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 146—88.

[19] From The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (1907), quoted from the Boston

edn, 1918, p. 4. The entire text is one big illustration of the problem described here of an

individual exposed to the ups and downs of his own career.

[20] Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore,1982). This consequently means that the mass

media themselves are second-order parasites, parasites which live parasitically on the

parasiticality of their viewers.

[21] This is not to deny that certain effects of imitation play a role, especially in the

fashionable domains of clothing, hairstyle, ‘casual’ gestures, open portrayal of sexual

interests.

[22] This is exactly what Adam Smith’s often misinterpreted concept of ‘sympathy’ means:

‘Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of

the situation which excites it’ i (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; new edn

(Lon􀀀don, 1853; repr. New York, 1966), p. 7). This is backed up by modern attribution

research which for its part observes that actors understand and explain their actions in

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relation to the situation they are in, whereas observers tend instead to attribute it to

characteris􀀀tics of the actor.

[23] For the starting point of the later debate, see Edward Young, ‘Conjectures on Original

Composition’ (1759), in Complete Works (Lon􀀀don, 1854; repr. Hildesheim, 1968), vol. 2, pp.

547-86. Cf. also Stendhal, De l’amour (1822), quoted from the Paris 1959 edn [cf Stendhal,

Love (Harmondsworth,1975)]. Here, we find the problem as a contrast of types of the

homme-copie (p. 276) and of authentic candeur (‘cette qualite d’une ame qui ne fait aucun

retour sur elle-meme’, p. 99). See also the comparison of the characters of Titan and

Roquairol, the latter spoiled by anticipated experience, that is, by reading, in Jean Paul’s

‘Titan’, in Werke, vol. 2 (Munich, 1969), pp. 53-661. The entire concept must raise for the

reader the counter􀀀question of how he could manage to be unreflexively authentic and, in

spite of reading, remain so.