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70 Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner

In looking for institutions that enable a society to find this kind
of transcontextual agreement, public communication structures
seem to play a fundamental role. On the one hand, they comment on
political decisions and explain them to the citizens; on the other
hand, they collect expectations and demands of the citizens and pre-
sent them to the political system. Political public opinion therefore
may be regarded as a communication system that mediates between
the citizens and the political system by reciprocally selecting and
transferring information (see Jarren 1998). From the past we can
distinguish between three different forms of public opinion: the pub-
lic sphere grounded on encounters, the public sphere based on
assemblies, and the public opinion generated by mass media (Ger-
hards and Neidhardt 1990). Through specific ways of selecting, clus-
tering, and disseminating information, each kind of these public
spaces involves opacities as well as discoveries of new forms of per-
ceiving and constructing reality. Through particular ways of select-
ing and codification media generate specific ways of world-making
as well as areas of blindness. In the context of this paper, we would
like to profile the particularity of public opinion based on electronic
networks in relation to the public space based on mass media.

Mass Media and the All-Inclusive Public

Nowadays it is well known that modern societies generate numerous
orientation problems. The permanently growing abundance of infor-
mation and communication possibilities cannot be coped with with-
out the application of technical media as reduction mechanisms. It is
the function of newspapers, radio, and television to reduce the com-
plexity of these channels of communication—not only for a special
group, but for the whole society—down to an accessible scale (see
Luhmann 1996). Mass media does this by providing messages which
“. . . have an intrinsically public character, in the sense that they are
‘open’ or ‘available’ to the public” (Thompson 1995, 31).
This requires not only special techniques of filtering and prepar-
ing information, but, both in a technical as well as in a organiza-
tional sense, a structured interruption between the production of
information and their reception. The public, generated by mass
media, is not based upon the direct participation of citizens but on
centralized ways of selecting information and focussing on specific
topics. Mass communication offers no possibilities of a direct feed-
back. It is based on different roles known as “sender” and “receiver.”
The messages must be transmitted from the producers to the recipi-