I came up with a news titled 'Science reporting under threat in China', and it mentioned:
Leading Chinese journalists have called for dedicated science coverage, as their field is increasingly marginalised by market-oriented media reforms.
The Chinese Society of Science and Technology Journalism (CSSTJ) intends to petition China's official media watchdog, the Central Publicity Department (CPD) about the situation.
In China, the word with the closest meaning to 'science literacy' is simply 'science popularization'. Although a 'popularization' is less difficult to achieve than the 'literacy' enhancement, the former is hardly successful here due to, in my opinion, deficiency of the latter. People become less able to understand science-related issues. Consumers have no ideas about the technologies inside the products in the supermarket. Science and technology do not appear to be common in daily life. This is because scientific content only appear as a topic of science itself, rather than an involvement into issues which may attract more public concerns. Readers have to be interesting in science at first to refer to the science section of a newspaper, otherwise they have little or no opportunity to be reminded about science in other section of news.
This is not reflecting the real role science plays in the society. In fact science was the cores of several sensational social news last year in China, including the everlasting food and drug safety issues, dispute on the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and 'pseudoscience', and leakage of poisonous chemical in several factories. Related scientific knowledge is absolutely the key to better understand these issues as well as to draw a conclusion of one's own, but the media, as usual, mostly dwelt on people and opinions without a full explanation of the scientific background, and leave it to the readers to decide which side they should take. The public are therefore easily misled and frightened on these issues. At the same time when these issues were reported in the social or local news sections of the newspaper, the science section was introducing only irrelevant subjects.
When people feel that science and technology are close to their lives, they will pay more attention to them. This is why digital cameras, MP3, health care, diet and nutritional science, sexual science attract people more efficiently in the science section of a newspaper than other scientific issues. Alternatively, when people are mentally well prepared in an area they tend to be more interested in the corresponding contents. That is perhaps why news of astronomy and astrophysics sometimes appears (especially the Pluto affair last year) - everyone has been excited by the universe in high school. But applied chemistry and physics, mostly dully-appeared in textbooks, are currently deprived from public media, although they related more than any others to the social life. This is the evidence of how 'science literacy' affect 'science popularization'.
Chinese public have witnessed a decline in science literacy since the 1980s. When Deng Xiaoping announce the 'four modernizations' and other policy attentions on science and technology, there was a renaissance of science in the public, especially the youth. I can still remember the books I read in my childhood. It was fashionable among kids to talk about stars and planet, interesting physical experiments and stories about scientists. To be a good talker, one have to read more 'science popularizing' books. One of the best-seller of this kind was the 14-volume The 100,000 Whys (十万个为什么). Recently I reviewed some of its volumes and was shocked by the difficulty of the concepts involved: polymer, isotope, vagus nerve, etc. I cannot imagine how could I be reading these texts with high fervency. Nowadays, however, our children are spending most of their time on computer games and iPod - no wonder, because the 'science and technology' sections of all the newspaper today are full of introductions of digital products. How large a percentage of today's children may devote themselves into science research is unknown, but possibly the chemistry research in the future will be more, say, computer-game-oriented?? (We already have a great tic-tac-toe-playing DNA mechine: Nano Lett. 2006, 6, 2598-2603. DOI: 10.1021/nl0620684.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment