THE REALITY OF MEDIA RESEARCH

PLENUM IV

The Reality of Media Research

GUIDO ZURSTIEGE

I The Reality of Media Research

Of course, the title of my speech is ambiguous: On the one hand the reality of media re-
search that is the reality of academic and non-academic institutions which engage in this
field of research, the reality of their staffs and students, researchers and scientific com-
munities, their routines, topics, methods – and, sometimes, their ambitions and obses-
sions. In short, from this perspective we are talking about the status, the current situa-
tion of and the challenges for media research. And than, on the other side, the reality of
media research that is all that which is produced within this framework. In short, from
this perspective we are talking about the sense-making, all that which appears to be real,
factual, provisionally true (at least not false) with reference to the media.
Obviously these two realities are closely connected – for the observed reality de-
pends on the reality of the observer. This, of course, is not the exclusive fate of re-
searchers only but of every observer in general. Though it might help, one does not
necessarily have to be a constructivist devotee to acknowledge that at least here media
research is on common ground with the object of its observations. As Hans Mathias
Kepplinger (2001) – who, for sure, is no constructivist proselyte – has recently stated:
The represented world in the media is an effect of the representation of the world by the
media. Accordingly, I argue, the reality of media research, understood as all that which
appears to be real and factual concerning the media is an effect of the current situation of
media research. In this speech I will focus on three major “arenas” of the contemporary
debate – namely on topics, theories and empirical experience of media research. I will en-
ter into this discussion from the perspective of one major academic discipline in the field
of media research: communication science.

II Additional Topics and Disintegrated Theories

As Martin Löffelholz and Thorsten Quandt (2003) have pointed out, the situation of
communication science in Germany may best be characterized by two complementary
developments: Expansion and differentiation. The discipline has grown continuously
ever since the tradition was established in the first decade of the 20th century in Leipzig
(1916) and in Münster (1919) and then, a couple of years later, in Munich (1924) and in

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Berlin (1925). Of course, this early tradition is characterised by a strong focus on news-
papers and journalism. Meanwhile media research in general is being offered under many
different labels at more than 50 academic institutions in Germany. Growing media mar-
kets, especially induced by the commercial television and radio in the 1980s and new
information and communication technologies in the 1990s, of course, fostered this de-
velopment as well as the fact that ‘media’ and ‘communication’ still are buzzwords that
fire desires. Irene Neverla (2003: 59) has recently speculated kindly that despite of this
breathless dynamic communication science frequently demonstrates its affectionate in-
clination for self-reflection. After all, she assumes, that’s what makes this discipline so
warm and human. “What do we do? “Who are we?” “Where do we go?” “where do we
come from?” – questions like these are somewhat notorious, the answers, however, are
changing.
Round about four years ago the German Communication Association (DGPuK) (2001)
presented a declaration in which it outlined its self-conception. This declaration, the so
called “Identity-Paper”, was published under the ambitious title “Media Society and its
Science”. I will recurrently return to this paper in order to use it as a reference to mark
differences. I would like to put emphasis on the fact, however, that this paper was elabo-
rated by two members of the scientific community (Anna M. Theis-Berglmair and Günter
Bentele) collectively and it was published for many, indeed: over 700, members of this
scientific community. It is meant as the least common denominator of an expanding dis-
cipline, and therefore, you will hardly find any institute in Germany, any approach or
school, that can fully subscribe to it.
Almost all areas of social life are penetrated by the media and – thus the declaration
goes – communication science has assigned itself to describe and to explore this complex
and certainly ongoing process. Obviously, this declaration is ambitious because media
research thus assumes responsibility for almost all areas of social life, which triggers a
massive proliferation of psychological, sociological, political, economical and many other
problems with regard to media and communication. The scope of this challenging en-
gagement is mirrored reliably by the many different labels and makes under which media
research is conducted. And, of course, these divergent labels and makes also mirror the
fact that the wide range of problems calls for specialisation. Professionals and of media
research are highly specialised experts and this, of course, also explains why identity
papers and identity commissions are necessary at all. Given the ambitious call for re-
sponsibility, of course, a wide variety of new research topics and new problems pour into
the field of media research. Digital and interactive media, of course, pose new problems;
popular-culture is a challenge to the discipline, just alike youth culture and subculture,
fictional media products call for recognition; visual communication, of course, is up-and-
coming, organisational communication just alike, research in public relations is doing
fine, yet we have to intensify our efforts, and son on – this, indeed, can be called a
breathless dynamic!
The argument usually goes thus: Research in the fields of A, B or C is up-and-coming
because the discipline cannot credibly assume responsibility for the so called media
society and at the same time fail to deal with one of its most present, influential, relevant,
compromising, promising symptoms as A, B or C. Without any doubt one of these re-
search fields which are up and coming, yet widely neglected by communication science
is advertising research. To illustrate the argument let us have a closer look at this field of
research and the respective discussion within the scientific community.

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In General the German Communication Association states: “Through the dynamic

expansion of the media system a range of additional areas of relevance to society have
developed, for which the subject offers a practically orientated competence: for example,
problematic media content (e.g. advertisement, or the portrayal of violence in video films
or on television)”. This notion precisely mirrors the stand of advertising as a research
object within communication science in Germany. Advertising is a new, additional and
problematic form of media product that, above all, poses practical problems – all four
notions, of course, are off the mark.
Promotional media offers are at least as old as editorial media offers, they are neither
produced nor distributed or received additionally because they are an integral part of the
media system, and they are not problematic by themselves. Finally advertising does not
pose only practical but also hard theoretical problems. Yet, in the light of communication
science advertising belongs to the, so to say, noisy interferences which contaminate the
premium messages exchanged between transmitters and receivers. No wonder, that we
dispose of a wide variety of concepts that explicate why and how people manage to get
around advertising: Switching, Flipping, Channel Hopping, Grazing, Jumping, Arrow-
ing, Leaving und certainly Zapping. Yet there seems to be ample evidence for the fact
that advertising serves a function within the program: As well as media offers in general
structure daily routines; advertising in particular structures reception routines. Advertis-
ing invites for comments on the media-program and offers visual distraction. Focussing
on radio advertisements Ernest Dichter, one of the most prominent, yet controversial
protagonists of the early advertising research who, by the way, collaborated with Paul F.
Lazarsfeld in Vienna, coined the term ‘rhythmical complementation’, which is to say, that
advertising plays a vital role within the flow of broadcasting. Media research as it is
conducted under the roof of communication science has widely neglected these func-
tions of advertising, however, we would be able to acquire a much deeper understanding
of how the media work for us, if we accounted for these widely neglected, yet vital func-
tions of supposedly noisy interferences.
To sum up the argument once again: Despite of an ambitious call for responsibility
neither all relevant aspects of the media, nor all relevant forms of media products are
sufficiently covered by media research as it is conducted under the roof of communica-
tion science. This, of course, is due to the fact, that the call for responsibility may rather
be understood as a prospective call. If, however, we take a closer look at the logic of this
prospective call for responsibility, I propose, the word ‘additional’ hits the mark of the
problem.
One of the core problems within the discipline, to me, seems to be that, for obvious
reasons, the discipline is expanding, yet it proliferates by adding new research fields,
whereas, the practice we are concerned with, works on a completely different logic of
proliferation. If one considers the topics media research has to deal with this becomes
very obvious: Wherever media researches come together the integration of TV, radio, the
press, the internet, online, landline and mobile phones is on the agenda. Of course, media
research is concerned with international networks and global players within the media
industry, with multimedia and cross-media. Wherever media researchers come together
they talk and write about these phenomena on the basis of the assumption that no new
medium simply adds up to any given media system, nor simply replaces older media but
leads to a structural and functional redefinition of the media system (cf unavoidably
Riepl 1913). The underlying logic of these processes, of course, is not an additive but an

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integrative logic, this is what we are concerned with: integration by difference manage-
ment. Yet, which efforts do we take in the practice of media research to cope with an in-
tegrative media practice? The ambitious call for responsibility, I propose, will avail only
if we dispose of theoretical tools that enable us to integrate the proliferating perspec-
tives within our expanding field of research. The Constructivist approach to media re-
search, I propose, has offered some of the respective theoretical tools.

III Reflexivity
On the timeline the point of origin to this approach to media and communication re-
search lies at the end of the 1980s. In that time Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt and
Siegfried Weischenberg edited a wide variety of contributions to media research in the
“Funkkolleg Medien und Kommunikation” which were later published in the anthology
Die Wirklichkeit der Medien (The reality of the media) (1994). Let us skip through the
table of contents: “The reality of the Observer”; “The social Construction of Reality”,
“The evolution of communication Media”; “The cultural History of the Media”; “The
Effects of Communication”, “Journalism as a social system” and so on – what unites the
wide variety of contributions to this anthology comes to a head in a profound doubt
towards the traditional stocks of the discipline, and this doubt roots in a more general
epistemic doubt concerning our capability of perceiving the reality as such.
Let us take a closer look at the roots of these doubts and begin with one of the cen-
tral concepts of our discipline: communication. Here the German Communication Asso-
ciation, as one of major institutional players within the field of media research states:
“Central focus of the subject is the indirect public communication transmitted via mass
media. The associated production, distribution and reception processes constitute the
key area of interest of the subject. […] Purely interpersonal communication is only of
interest as far as it constitutes a basis for processes of public communication. That
means, for example, that no linguistic analys[e]s are produced and no individual talks are
being analyzed. Yet, the role of interpersonal communication while watching a television
show or during online-communication is definitely of interest and thus being analyzed.”
(DGPUK 2001). Even though it appears to be rather difficult to handle all problems of the
discipline on the basis of this definition, the production, distribution and reception of
mass media offers are for sure core topics of the Constructivist approach to media re-
search, and thus, from this perspective, we could subscribe to the first part of this no-
tion.
However, on the basis of a Constructivist approach to media research we would defi-
nitely insist on a more decisive second part of the notion. In short: purely interpersonal
communication, is of interest not only as far as it accompanies mass communication, it
serves as a general model, and thus, both modes of communication are based on the
same principles. The outset of all communication processes, Klaus Merten (1977) has
maintained repeatedly with reference to Erving Goffman and Niklas Luhmann, is the fact
that we are observed observers. This notion, of course, has been worked out repeatedly
by many scholars, just as an early example I would like to name Georg Simmel’s (1908)
well known approach to a sociology of the senses. By first sight it is not that easy to
apply these premises on processes of mass communication because one of the points of
general agreement in the German community of media research is the way Gerhard
Maletzke (1963) has modelled the audience of the mass media: As we all know, the con-

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cept of the “mass” is for many reasons fairly problematic. Focusing on mass communica-
tion, Maletzke has argued, the term ‘mass’ is problematic because it suggests strong,
linear, irrational, however, predictable media-effects. It furthermore suggests the simulta-
neous presence of one mass, watching, reading, receiving one media offer which is a
delicate assumption since we observe a progressive proliferation of media offers as well
as a progressive proliferation of audiences. Readers, watchers, listeners, recipients of the
mass media in general, dissolve into disperse, broken up, separated, divided clutters of
audiences, if not into inorganic moods of reception. Whoever speaks of the audience
therefore implicitly employs an “operative fiction”. This is to say: The audience does
not exist, but we need it in order to know, what we are talking and what we are acting
about. Given these assumptions: If processes of mass communication are social proc-
esses then how do we, in this case, model the observed observer? Klaus Merten’s answer
to this question is thus: Whereas interactive communication episodes rely on the reflex-
ivity of perception, mass communication relies on the reflexivity of knowledge. This
means: In mass communication we usually do not perceive that others perceive that we
perceive, but we know that others know that we know that we and they perceive. This
social fiction serves as the basis for all communication processes mediated by the mass
media. It is highly virtual, but nonetheless leads to highly relevant and factual results.
Let us behold: one of the crucial concepts in approaching communication processes
is the concept of reflexivity. Whoever deals with reflexive processes, however, has to be
aware of the fact that the object of his observations is constantly changing, because the
effects of these processes are fed back into these very processes. On this background
Klaus Merten has drawn the conclusion that many treasured stocks of our discipline,
especially those in the field of media effects research, are fundamentally doomed to ex-
pire, because effects change effects. Closely connected to the above mentioned concept
of reflexivity is another crucial concept we have to take into account when we approach
communication processes: the concept of embeddedness, or epistemic involvement. The
substance of this crucial concept can be explained on the background of a short, yet
decisive anecdote in the evolution of a new Medium: the motion picture.

IV Embeddedness
When the Brothers Max and Emil Scladanowsky patented their film projector in Berlin in
1895, they emphasized that the specific feature of their device is that it would not be
heard by the audience. This means: At the outset of the motion picture stands the motion
picture that wants to disappear in order to accomplish the illusion. Round about one
hundred years later Sybille Krämer (1998) has pointed out that the media are the blind
spot in every process of media use. The premises we make in order to use the media have
to be the blind spot in processes of media use because otherwise the media would not
work for us the way they do. The consequences of this notion obviously depend on what
one calls the media. Most definitions of the term ‘medium’ have in common that they
emphasize the aspects of the linking, joining and connecting function of the media. Fol-
lowing Siegfried J. Schmidt’s (2000) approach to media theory we can put this initial as-
sessment in more concrete terms: All media are used to link and connect different cogni-
tive and/or social systems. This connection, however, does not evolve randomly but is
oriented towards the production of system-specific meaning. In other words: We use
media in order to generate meaning – whatsoever. The production of system-specific

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meaning, however, does not evolve out of the blue but is based on the specific
potentials of specific media. These general features are frequently applied to a wide va-
riety of different media. We can distinguish systemically four interrelated levels of those
media: On the first and most complex level we analyze media products, articles, spots,
advertisements and so on. These media products, of course, result from the specific for-
mation of the respective communication-instruments (for examples: natural languages or
pictures), all respective technologies needed to produce, distribute and receive these
media products, and finally the social-systemic organization of the production, distribu-
tion and reception of media products.
Of course, every observation has its specific blind spot, yet, on the basis of these
medium-theoretical premises, the specific problem of media research is, that the blind
spot of its observation is the object of its observation. Most media researchers “live” in
one or two language worlds, most of them produce texts and usually publish them in
magazines, books, sometimes in newspapers and thus address a scientific community. No
doubt: Through the practice of observing media research is embedded in the practice it
observes. On a more abstract level, this of course, is one of the core problems of con-
structivist research as it has been conducted by Siegfried J. Schmidt in the last years.
The autological problems of media research, one can say with reference to Siegfried J.
Schmidt (2003), are just but one version of the more general problem that we are always
already involved. Every judgement, every estimation, every opinion on the nature or
quality of something – Schmidt prefers to say with reference to Hegel: every positing –
of an observer unavoidably requires an antecedent in logic and fact as a presupposition.
If we say young we thus presuppose the semantic differentiation between young and
old; accordingly if we say cold we thus presuppose the multivalent differentiation
between ice-cold/cold/luke warm/warm/hot and so on. This, of course, resembles logical
figures that have been extensively discussed within the theory of logic, cognitive sci-
ence or Gestaltpsychology. Yet, the point Schmidt wants to emphasise is quite another.
The theoretical operation had become necessary, because even though constructivist
thinkers have tried to get away from it they have implicitly fostered a dualistic world
view: the world of thought, language, description or the media on the one hand, and the
real, yet, unreachable world on the other. As it was said above: What united the wide
variety of contributions to constructivist media research since the end of the 1980s was
a profound epistemic doubt concerning our capability of perceiving the reality as such.
The problem behind the “as such”, of course, has troubled generations of scholars, for
it evokes questions concerning the origin, nature, and limits of human knowledge. Sieg-
fried J. Schmidt, therefore, does not assume the overambitious task to solve this problem,
yet he tries to dissolve it, and he does so by the help of the cultural adjustment of his
constructivist argument. With every judgement, every estimation, every opinion on the
nature or quality of something we never begin, as Niklas Luhmann and, of course,
George Spencer Brown have maintained, in an “unmarked space” because with our ob-
servations we are always already involved in stories and discourses. This is to say: on
the basis of the mechanism of positing and presupposing we unavoidably revert to ante-
cedents in logic, communications which have been integrated in so called discourses,
and we unavoidably revert to antecedents in fact, actions which have been integrated in
so called stories (the latter term according to Wilhelm Schapp).
Schmidt refers to the semantic system of the possibilities that, as it were, “nurture”
stories and discourses and reversely is nurtured by them as the reality model of a soci-

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ety. The semantic differentiation between “Realität“ and “Wirklichkeit“, for example, is
possible in the German language and in the Danish language (Realitet / Virkelighed),
though it is not possible in English. The Reality model of a society can be described as
the collective knowledge every individual member of a society disposes of and which
emerges from acting and communicating with other members of the society. This seman-
tic system of possibilities, of course, needs a practical program that regulates possible
relations of categories and differentiations, their relevance in practical life, affective con-
tent and moral significance in a socially binding manner – and this program Schmidt re-
fers to as culture. The differentiation between good and bad, certainly, belongs to the
reality model of almost all societies, however, it is the object of constant cultural negotia-
tions within any given society as well as between different societies.

V Consequences
The short example of the previous paragraph shows two aspects. First: Culture, as con-
ceptualized by Schmidt, is stable, while being referred to, yet it learns, develops and
evolves with every application. Second: Due to this fact, culture is presupposed in every
communication process, and at the same time every culture fundamentally depends on
communication. On the basis of these theoretical manoeuvres, I would finally like to pro-
pose, we obtain a tool with which we can work on some of the urging problems of con-
temporary media research.
Whereas in the constructivist and realistic epistemology the reality “as such” is pre-
supposed, even though we might not reach it by the help of our routines and practices,
in the light of a non-dualistic approach we presuppose many other routines and prac-
tices, which might be just as limited and restricted as the ones at hand, but nonetheless
construe a reality “as such”. As to the subject matters we are concerned with: operating
without an ontological starting point means that we can observe the selectivity of spe-
cific communication-processes only in relation to the selectivity of other communication
processes. This drives us to acknowledge the fact that the respective media products we
focus on make sense only in a competing yet complementary relation to other media
products. Practically speaking this means that there is no theory of mass-communication
without an embedded theory of face-to-face-communication; there is no theory of jour-
nalism without embedded theories of Advertising, Public Relations or literature. There is
no theory of the television without an embedded theory of the letterpress, no theory of
email without an embedded theory of snail mail and so on. In the practice of our research
this change of perspective, of course, drives us to assume the logic of the practice we
conduct research on, and this logic spells out: integration by difference management.
Finally, as to the empirical practice of media research one of the crucial challenges is
this: We can – and we have to! – reflect about the experiences we make using the media
only to the price of new experiences with other media. Therefore we need to intensify our
efforts to improve empirical tools that account for us – unavoidably involved observers
in the field of media research. The more earnestly we consider the consequences that
follow when we reflect our own practices that virtually go without saying, the better we
can live up to the challenges posed by the expanding field of media research.

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