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72 Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner

which everyone can observe what the others observe. By this, the re-
ception of mass media products constitutes a (world) public arena in-
cluding the whole spectrum of social collectivities, in which
communication situations are pre-structured by themes for which
“universal acceptance can be assumed” (Luhmann 1996, 22). With-
out this mirror the (world) society would not be observable or com-
municable as a “world society,” and therefore not capable of
reproduction. It would, instead, disperse into fragmented areas and
cultures which would not share the messages selected by mass
media as a common background.
The term “mass society” can therefore be understood as a global
spread of messages and code patterns created by mass media. These
are applied to every recipient, in principle, and therefore to a mass
public, but leave open how they are interpreted. Mass media create,
according to Featherstone (1990), a sort of “meta-culture” because of
the cognitive schemata they bring into circulation, and therefore a
collection of codes of perceiving and constructing reality, codes avail-
able world-wide. The messages and views of life spread by mass
media cannot be translated completely into the multitude of con-
stituent social contexts; they can, however, be adapted according to
specific preferences and interests. In this way symbolic forms are
created which cross all traditional forms of socialization and class.
So, the public of mass media serves as a reference point for an un-
limited audience and for social distinctions as well. 1
Participation in a common information world depends on the se-
lection monopoly of mass media, which allows for no interference
from the recipients. It shatters as soon as the technically- and orga-
nizationally-based role definitions between sender and receiver are
removed (compare Wehner 1997). The inclusion and synchronization
services of mass media further depend on the fact that their prod-
ucts are presented in such a way that the communicator remains
invisible (compare Schmidt 1994). If mass media were to show them-
selves as communicators, their texts and pictures would be recog-
nized as selective interpretations of the world, and would no longer
be accepted as an objective view of current events. Television is only
a “window to the world” so long as the viewers ignore the mediating
function of the medium and therefore succumb to the fiction of di-
rectly experiencing the events presented in pictures and text. It is
only under these conditions that the instruments of mass media,
such as television, represent more than just a further possible ob-
server’s perspective among many others. And only in this way the re-
cipient does allow this to become a common backdrop used for the
proliferation and comparison of personal perspectives and points of