Social media, mass media and social reality construction

Since the 1990s, the Internet serves as a projection space for varied visions of a more transparent and integrative public sphere and a less dominant role of mass media in the social construction of a "common" reality. In light of those expectations, this text scrutinizes the relations between digital social media and mass media from a systems-theoretical perspective and observes the present preferences of German onliners as well as the content quality of network communications (weblogs, podcasts, social networking services, microblogging). The investigations lead to the conclusion that social media and mass media are situated on complementary levels of publicness.