Using the Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann as an optical device, this presentation tries to illuminate how distance education and technology- based teaching are placed between tradition and renewal. This position between tradition and novelty induces a number of problems related to the actual possibilities of how one can communicate in distance education, and to the expectations and ideals teachers and students in distance education project onto this form of teaching and learning. I will try to demonstrate how teaching at a distance employing educational technology, relies on strategies for compensation for this distance, by means of simulation of immediacy, nearness and relative intimacy. I will demonstrate this by using examples from three different comparative studies of communication related to distance education: lectures in the lecture theatre compared to lectures taped on videogrammes, tutoring face-to-face compared to tutoring on- line, and oral exams in the traditional setting compared to oral exams using videoconferencing. Simulating immediacy and nearness demonstrates a vital function in Systems Theory, namely the desire to sustain the communicative system. This is a vital dimension in distance education because maintaining the interest and stimulating the ongoing encounters is paramount in a educational system with few face-to-face observations. Without this compensation most students would fail to use the communicative tools as well as the learning materials, and thereby further communication would be difficult to sustain, e.g. the communicative system would break down. A crucial element in face-to-face-teaching is that the teachers have visual contact with the students, which make relevant observations possible and evident: students accept being observed and vice-versa. The explication of milestones, detailed schemes for participation, text productions, interactions etc. are other examples of attempts at making distance education compensate for obvious elements of face- to face teaching and learning situations: reduction of distance and the relative restrictions on behalf of the teachers to make one's appearance visible and significant for the students. Copying a genre of education - both by its characteristics as well as its rhetoric - from a context of on-campus to a context of "on-line" might have the significant effect of reducing the complexity of teaching and learning, which is an other significant dimension of Systems Theory. It makes the genre recognizable for students, and thereby make students adjust their expectations. On the other hand, failing to copy the original genre might cause confusion and misapprehensions, and create larger expectations than the medium can deliver. Thereby the complexity of the system is enlarged. My investigation suggests that a direct comparison is difficult to undertake, because the form an shape of teaching changes substantially when it is transposed to a new medium for the purpose of distance education. The combination of genre- and media-references in the transformation from one context of teaching to an other might be problematic in relation to how we understand the particular form of teaching. If there are contradictions in terms of mediareference and forms of teaching, these contradictions makes the understanding of the genre "distance education" almost impossible. Distance education, therefore, seems to excist in a dilemma between traditional and new, independent forms of teaching, in a conflict between copying the established genre characteristics of the traditional teaching and establishing new forms which are more feasible for emergent structures of communication.