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Electronic Networks and Civil Society 71

ents. Thus, the context of production is structurally decoupled from
the context of reception. The situation in which the relevant events
are gathered and the messages are produced is different from the
situation in which the message is received. Producers and recipients
are unequal partners in this process of symbolic exchange. The re-
cipients have relatively little power to exercise influence on the top-
ics of communication. In addition to this, the access to mass media
and the possibility of rising to speak in mass media are not egalitar-
ian—that is to say, relatively few people can influence this kind of
public opinion. So, institutions and organized actors like firms, po-
litical parties, etc., face fewer obstacles to presenting their opinion in
mass media than single and non-organized actors. Compared with
such institutions and organized actors, the influence of the recipi-
ents is restricted to more indirect ways, such as readers’ letters, etc.
But only these organizational and technical conditions enable a
statement, a sound, or a picture to be infinitely reproduced, and
therefore distributed in an identical form to, in principle, an unlim-
ited number of recipients—manifested in the distribution of live
events watched by hundreds of millions people worldwide. By watch-
ing television or reading a newspaper people get the impression that
they are receiving the same information at the same time as an un-
limited number of others. Thus, mass media draws the attention of
an unlimited number of recipients towards a limited number of top-
ics and statements.
The mass media guidelines of visualization and textualization
create the conditions that allow the most extraordinary events in the
remotest parts of the world to be translated into an anonymous sign
system, through which they become accessible to a world wide dis-
tributed audience. These standards have, in addition, contributed to
the development of international arenas in which the representa-
tives of different national institutions (for example the spokesper-
sons of different governments) react to, and are able to communicate
with, one another by specified rules of conduct and rhetoric on
events of world political significance. After all, mass media support
the distribution of global economic, political and cultural standards,
and provide a field of comparison for the relative national or regional
variations.
In this way a public information world emerges that can reach
transcontinental dimensions in this age of satellite communication.
Following Niklas Luhmann, mass media generates “a background
knowledge which provides a starting point for communication” (Luh-
mann 1996, 121). They can be compared with a great “mirror” in