Ever since Marshall McLuhan sort of discovered them, we are used to inquire into the media of the dissemination of communication, the most prominent among them being language, writing, and print, painfully singled out in their distinction by comparing them to the modern media of film, television, and the computer. The knowledge, however, that communication means some kind of a circulation of meaning, seeing it getting lost and making its reappearance like some capricious river seeking to avoid the bed it is set to choose, or like a dream challenging all knowledge we thought to have about time, space, and causality, is much older. It goes back at least to John Locke, who is explicit about the distinction between man's thoughts hidden in his mind, on one hand, and the communication of these thoughts via signs, to "the comfort and advantage of society," on the other. An awareness of the necessity to distinguish between the perspectives of the speaker, the listener, and the speech, respectively, is already evident in the ancients' reflection on the scope and pitfalls of rhetoric (Aristotle 2006). It indeed stems at least from humans making up their mind with respect to the signs sent to them by spirits and gods, and to possibilities to both interpret and subvert these signs. Up to Enlightenment hopes are rampant that the circulation of ideas, as distinguished from their imperfect understanding by the human mind, might take care of a realization of reason beyond the passions and interests of human beings.

Sociology has been late to go into this kind of research. It somehow prefers to take dissemination media as an expression of a mere literary value of the "real" structures of society leading to its social stratification and inequality. This is only changing since Talcott Parsons discovered what he calls symbolic media of communication (like, as he has them, money, power, influence, affect, intellect) and ventured the thesis that these symbolic media might become as important for the social order of modern society as stratification has been for the order of traditional society, indeed replacing the latter as the primary means to secure order. Symbolic media here means that social action in its evolution discovers in some situation the value of certain signs in selecting and motivating a certain course of action, generalizes these signs, and puts them as symbols of the selection and motivation of action to the disposal of further situations. Thus, coins and bonds (assets and liabilities), the exposure of the means to threaten violence (weapons and their bearer), gestures of authority believed by others (the auspices of power), claims for the solidarity of the other (emotion), or the demonstration of abilities to adapt (learning), come to be taken as symbols of, respectively, money, power, influence, affect, and intelligence, ready to be quoted, due to the situation, in further situations, and beginning to circulate on their own, so to speak.
Niklas Luhmann is the first to explicitly distinguish between dissemination media and symbolic media, the latter of which he also calls success media, since in the general situation of improbable communication (why should anybody try to speak out, or to listen, anyway?) they provide for pointed means to single out what one is up to, and what not, thereby making it easier to receive and accept a communication. Ever since, the impact of the media of communication on the structure of society is evident, and may be taken up with respect to a general theory of social memory as well as of social meaning.

We here propose to stick with the distinction between dissemination media and symbolic media, giving the former a general status for the theory of society and relegating the latter to specific structures of modern society. That may seem a little arbitrary, but for the moment it enables us to concentrate on the effects of dissemination and to ask for possible variations in the securing of the success of communication. I venture that the function of symbolic media, in modern society, i.e., in the printing press society, is comparable to the function of tribes in oral society, of social strata in literal society, and perhaps of knowledge in our, i.e., in the "next", society.

What I would like to take up here is a conjecture advanced by Niklas Luhmann when he speculated about the possibility to indeed distinguish between writing, print, and the computer with respect to the "catastrophes" (René Thom) they released by their introduction to society, saying that the introduction of the computer may be comparable only to the introduction of writing and printing before, and that its consequences may be as far reaching for the restructuring of the society as these.

The idea, which Luhmann here is conceiving, consists in assuming that any new dissemination medium overtaxes the given structures of the society by presenting them with a surplus meaning, an overflow, which it is not used to deal with (Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main 1997, chap. 2.XIV.). This triggers a catastrophe by forcing the society to either switch to another mode of reproduction or to reduce the new media introduced to some structure which is in line with its received and established way to deal with meaning, for instance to reduce writing to a device for poets memorizing their orations, the printing press to a means to circulate holy scriptures, or the computer to a data store. Evidently, something else happened, and is happening right now, and that is what we are interested in.

Our idea is that Luhmann's conjecture about dissemination media proves to be something of a perfect way to look at the network synthesis of both received and emerging social structures, thus enabling us to learn about ways to conceive of the relationship between communication, dissemination, and social structure and to watch what is going on right now in a society dealing with the critical problem, to say the least, of the introduction of the computer.

We will extend a little on Luhmann's conjecture by adding language as a further dissemination medium producing such a criticality (Per Bak) and by not only looking at the culture form of the society dealing with any new dissemination medium, but also at the way it numbers its elements, at its respective social order, and at the way it re-enters its own form, including the unmarked state, into the form. Luhmann does not ask about language in his conjecture because we may know too little about its introduction to a society still enmeshed in structures of mere mutual perception, to really venture about the culture, which it brings forth to be able to draw upon. And he focuses on the issue of the culture form because he is interested in the way a society is controlling itself via a selective handling of the meaning produced by communication, and spares the questions of order, number and re-entry for his chapters on the evolution (chap. 3), the differentiation (chap. 4), and the self-description of the society (chap. 5).

We do here not try to work out a whole theory of the society but are only interested in the means to better watch the introduction of the computer into it. As I take it, Luhmann may well have considered his theory of the modern society as a preliminary exercise to watching the introduction of the computer, since we can only know what might possibly change if we know what actually there is, that is, which actual structures solve what kind of social problems and might be replaced by what kind of other, yet functionally equivalent structures. Yet, he was cautious enough to not present a theory of the computer society as long as there is no theory of the printing press society, i.e., the modern society, which he therefore settled to develop first, thus embarking on an endeavor which took him thirty years to accomplish it.

Given that Luhmann has written a theory of the modern society, including its evolution from previous traditional and tribal society, we may venture into a theory of the meaning form of the society with respect to dominant media of dissemination. The decisive features of any one meaning form, and we settle here to focus on language, writing, print, and the computer, are its way (1) to frame the dissemination of communication ("culture form"), (2) to translate that control into structures of the society ("number"), (3) to control what is inside, and what is outside of the frame ("order"), and (4) to reflect the risks and chances of the meaning form via a reflection device, a semantics of self-description, that allows to both affirm and negate it ("re-entry").

Note, that we do not assume the meaning forms of the different dissemination media to replace, but to superimpose, each other. As writing does not displace language, but transforms it, so the printing press and the computer do not displace all earlier dissemination media, but transform them to some new function, thereby at the same time in a way possibly toning down their criticality. It ensues a society which up to now succeeds in surviving all catastrophes of the introduction of a new dissemination medium, yet develops a complexity of dealing with meaning which certainly is as impressive as daring. And, to be sure, society does not rely on sociological knowledge to be able to hold on to this complexity. It does it all by itself, though it also does not preclude sociological observers trying to make up their mind while taking part in its communication. That is why in the next chapter we will go on from this evolution of dissemination media, dealt with in this chapter, to a more general model of social action, which will try to show how social action is able to reproduce in a situation which may be characterized by some meaning form of the computer society giving it a new kind of a network synthesis.