Critical studies, examples of a critical reflection paper

critical studies in media

McLuhan saw the present age as a new Renaissance, a new sensory galaxy ushered in by electronic media that are capable of jolting our sensibilities as sharply as the printing press did earlier. The present is the "early part of an age for which the meaning of print culture is becoming as alien as the meaning of manuscript culture was to the eighteenth century." Ironically, America, which has the largest backlog of obsolete technology, now leads the transition into the electronic era. It thus suffers the most severe pains of conversion. "The new electric galaxy of events has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg galaxy…"

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Cooley attributed a contemporary climate of strain and anxiety to modern media, and he made a tentative explanation for it. The enlargement of social environment through the media produced "a more rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images, sentiments, and impulses." For many persons this brought "an over-excitation which weakens or breaks down character." Cooley frequently described this problem in the pathological terms common to early sociological studies: suicide, insanity, nervous prostration, drug abuse. A less serious effect, "very generally produced upon all except the strongest minds, appears to be a sort of superficiality of imagination, a dissipation of impulse, which watches the stream of personal imagery go like a procession, but lacks the power to organize and direct it."

example of a critical reflection paper

As a guard against mental exhaustion and dissipation from this flotsam of images, Cooley underlined the need to build one's moral strength. The Victorian stress upon character and selfcontrol was Cooley's line of defense. The vocabulary of pathology, as well as the vigilance he proposed, revealed that Cooley felt more comfortable with the abstract entity of modern communication than with its omnipresent, insistent reality. At best, Cooley could only wonder about the worth of the new popular culture arising with the waves of modern media. He found it difficult to reconcile the faith in modern communication with his lifelong devotion to art.

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Cooley acknowledged that the new popular culture still fulfilled an urgent need even if it did not include the noblest forms of art. "A best seller or a motion picture appealing to the superficial and undisciplined sentiment of a million people is not the art we look for though it may be better than none at all." Like that of Jane Addams, his version of a popular culture included a call for a "livelier community spirit" in all towns and neighborhoods. This community spirit would balance the larger common culture flowing outside "the channels of public guidance and formal institutions, working upon us through newspapers, popular literature, the drama, motion pictures, and the like."

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Cooley always returned to the safety of inevitable progress. He readily admitted that "the reality of progress is a matter of faith, not of demonstration." Since progress was a moral category, the question of whether it took place was one of moral judgment. This belief, coupled with a conception of society bordering on the solipsistic, make Cooley seem quaint, even irrelevant, today. Yet his transcendent faith in the psychical unity of self and society places him squarely in the Emersonian tradition of American thought. Cooley closely resembles the Emerson intent on dissolving all barriers between the self and the oversoul, the Emerson who described the world as "this shadow of the soul, or other me."

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Dewey, in reviewing Lippmann's influential work, rejected the replacing of the public with a small coterie of informed administrators: "There remains the possibility of treating news events in the light of a continuing study and record of underlying conditions. The union of social science, access to facts, and the art of literary presentation is not an easy thing to achieve. But its attainment seems to me the only genuine solution of the problem of an intelligent direction of social life. . . . The enlightenment of public opinion still seems to me to have priority over the enlightenment of officials and directors."

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Thirty years after the "Thought News" adventure, Dewey still hoped for a new kind of press: one that would combine modern means of communication, social science techniques, and artistic presentation to provide a continuous, systematic, and effective exposition of social and political movements. Such a press would be an important check on the various expert organizations rapidly becoming a key part of modern government. As in the 1890s, he argued that it could conceivably compete with the sensational press: "This is an artistic as well as an intellectual problem, for it supposes not only a scientific organization for discovering, recording and interpreting all conduct having a public bearing, but also methods which make presentation of the results of inquiry arresting and weighty."

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Clearly, the physical means of communication -- telegraph, telephone, radio, rapid mail delivery, and the printing press -- had far outrun "the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of its results." By this time Dewey seemed less sanguine about the ease with which these two phases would reinforce one another. He nevertheless restated his old vision of a reconstructed press, which would fuse social science to an aesthetically presented daily newspaper: "The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry, and subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it."

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There are several ways in which sociologists who work mathematically with theory have acquired the necessary mathematical background. At the one extreme, there is a small minority who have come to sociology with a significant background in mathematics -- for example, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, whose Vienna doctorate was in mathematics. Others, like James S. Coleman and Raymond Boudon, came to sociology from other fields that had a significant mathematical content; Coleman from chemical engineering and Boudon from econometrics. A third group, of which William N. McPhee is an exemplar, recognized the value of mathematics only when they were already graduate students in sociology.

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McPhee had his first post-high school mathematics in an informal course that I taught one year at the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. A similar pattern is that of Robert McGinnis, who became a mathematical sociologist after attending a "summer institute" sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. Finally, there is that most remarkable category of all, the autodidact, or self-taught mathematical or statistical sociologist; my only example here is Alan B. Wilson, of the University of California, Berkeley, a statistical sociologist whose insight into linear statistical methods, such as factor analysis and regression analysis, is as dazzling as Lazarsfeld's into tabular analysis and scaling.