Foreword: Media Effects

摘要

This issue of Cybernetics & Human Knowing is based on five articles-that Steffen Roth and I requested-around the central theme of media effects. The idea is to offer media theory a variety of perspectives on such effects that derive from social theory. While these perspectives are certainly valuable in order to counterbalance a theory of media effects that continues to take the message as its starting point and examines the conditions under which media may produce effects on individuals (Bryant & Zillmann, 1989; Potter, 2012; Valkenburg, Peter, & Walther, 2016)-for instance by looking at how media create the individual, that is, its "secondary need for self-schematizations" (Luhmann, 2000, p. 113) in the first place-they are necessary for a far more foundational reason; as commonplace as the observation and the critique of media effects is, media theory has not managed to develop a consistent concept of what presumably causes these effects-the medium. Because of this, we have in fact been looking at a variety of different media theories in lieu of media theory proper; and as one result, the relationship between the concept of communication and the concept of medium has yet to be clearly articulated (as pointed out by Behringer, 2006). It may well be that the abstract media concept offered here, introduced by Heider (1959) and generalized by Luhmann (2012), using Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (2008), is able to meet this demand.