Society seems to be advancing at the
speed of light. It is said that one issue of the New York Times puts out more
information than the entire Middle Ages did. One of the things we owe this too
is the invention of modern science. Without science we wouldn’t have advanced
in knowledge about us humans and about the world. Then we also have the mass
media which allows people from all over the world to send and receive ideas and
information from people they don’t even know.
Science emerged in the 300s BCE
in Greece, Babylon, India, China and Egypt. In ancient Greece the fields of
mathematics, astronomy, biology, physics and medicine were explored by great
thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato. However with the fall of the Roman Empire
scientific advances slowed down and with the rise of the Catholic Church people
turned towards philosophy and religion.
The rebirth of science was due to four
major factors which were the renaissance, the invention of the
printing press, the age of exploration and the protestant
reformation. Now rather than employing philosophical speculation,
scientists used the scientific method which is an objective and systematic way
to gather information and come to conclusions. Modern science however didn’t
come to light until the 1800s and early 1900s.The norms of scientific research
are universalism, organized skepticism, communalism, disinterestedness
and counter-norms. Fraud is one of the realities of scientific
research. A famous example was the “missing link” of human evolution which in
this case was the skull of a human and the jaw of an orangutan. Another problem
is competition which is one of the principal causes of norm violation in the
scientific field.
The mass media are instruments of
communication that reach a large audience without having a personal relationship
between the people sending it and the people receiving it. The
instutionalization of the mass media includes writing and paper, the
printing press, the industrial age and the computer and the
information society. A few examples of mass media are print media
(books, newspapers and magazines), audio media (music, audio books), visual
media (television, movies, DVDs), online media (the internet) and convergence
which is integration of two different medias such as a news paper with a web
page. From the functionalist perspective, the mass media perform functions that
support the stability of society. From a conflict perspective the purpose is to
maintain social order. Some issues with mass media are what the media exposes
to children, effects on civic and social life and the power that it holds.
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| Different types of Mass Media |
Thanks to the mass media and the
scientific institution, we are able to enjoy many luxuries in the modern world.
Yet science is advancing so fast that in a few years what we consider modern
will be obsolete.
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