Abstract
At heart, current concerns for the public understanding of science see ‘popular science’ as a contradiction in terms. What is science is too abstruse to be popular, and what is popular is too vulgar to be science. It stems from the traditional view of popularisation of science as a process of communication whereby scientific information is disseminated to the public at large. The dominant view is of the filtration of knowledge from the scientist in ‘his’ laboratory to the ‘man-in-the-street’. ‘Pure’, ‘genuine’ scientific knowledge is contrasted with the ‘polluted’ popularised version, and communication simplifies, or even adulterates and distorts. Pristine science thus becomes corrupted into a popular account.1 With such a perspective the study of popularisation becomes framed in terms of ‘accuracy’ and ‘misunderstanding’. It concerns itself with levels of scientific ‘literacy’ and making sure the public know (and get) the ‘right answers’. It sees in the public a deficiency which has to be made good, a gap to be plugged, a hole to be filled.
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Notes
See S. Hilgartner, ‘The dominant view of popularisation: conceptual problems, political uses’, Social Studies of Science, 20 (1990), pp. 519–39.
See Stuart Hall, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, in Micheal Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott, Culture, Society and the Media (London, 1982).
See, for example, G. Philo, Seeing and Believing: The influence of television (London, 1990);
H. Collins, Television: Policy and culture (London, 1990);
and A. Goodwin and G. Whannel, Understanding Television (London, 1990).
Christopher Dornan, ‘Science and scientism in the media’, Science as Culture, Vol. 1 (1989), no. 7, pp. 101–21.
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the organisation of consent in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 165 and 98.
Adrian Desmond, ‘Artisan resistance and evolution in Britain, 1819–1848’, Osiris, second series, vol. 3 (1987), p. 78.
See also Richard Johnson, ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: radical education and working-class culture’, in John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson, Working-Class Culture: Studies in history and theory (London, 1979), pp. 75–102.
John Laurent, ‘Science, society and politics in late-nineteenth-century England: a further look at mechanics’ institutes’, Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984), p. 586.
As is claimed by Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant ideology Thesis (London, 1980).
Royal Society, The Public Understanding of Science (London, 1985).
Neil Ryder, ‘Vernacular science: something to rely on in your actions?’, in P.J. Black and A.M. Lucas, Children’s Informal Ideas (London, 1987). ‘Democratic epistemologies’ is a term coined by Logie Barrow in Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English plebeians, 1850–1910 (London, 1986).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall (California, 1984).
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© 1996 Peter Broks
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Broks, P. (1996). Conclusion. In: Media Science before the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25043-1_10
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