Mass media and erosion of culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At a time when, apparently, we have the right degree of freedom and extraordinary technical means to expand those qualitative aspects which are crucial to a good society, such as communication and culture, there are increasingly loud voices questioning the role of the mass media in creating a public arena guided by what Max Weber called ethical or “substantive rationality.” For many, the discussion of contrary opinions and the exchange of reasoned arguments has been severely compromised by a flow of information which encourages iconomania, or a passion for the image, and promotes the supremacy of the visual over the intelligible and the decay of abstract thought and of clear, distinct ideas, in sum, by reducing the potentialities opened up by the modern world to their merely strategic elements. In this essay, while not doubting such negative effects of developments in the information sphere as have occurred, I seek to understand the persistence of certain ways of thinking about modern society which neither accept that communication can be reduced to the mere conveying of commodified information, nor are limited to highlighting the perverse effects of the progress of reason and technology. My argument takes into account the perennial aspects of communication, namely participatory experience, contact, sharing, commonality, and the establishing of reflexive ties over time between the community and its cultural context. The development of a civic, universalist and cultural notion of communication may usefully draw on neglected ideas such as those of the Chicago School in the 1920s and of Canadian thinker Harold Innis. In the context of the shifts and changes of our age, these types of thinking, undertaken by other thinkers, have significant potential for increasing awareness that communication is only possible by means of those modalities which create experience and the feeling of belonging to a community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".