Mediating Journals: Reaching out to a Public beyond the Scientific Community

In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Band 26, Heft 3, S. 393-403

Abstract

The periphial audience of popular social science can be estimated at about 1.5 million. A major challenge to social science journals is the conversion of intellectual soft currency based upon self-help into a vision of the world. The medium of social science is faced with the problem of, on the one hand, a social science network being the "biggest fish in the pond," but in a larger media context, the "smallest of fish." An important mediating role of social science is its potential for changing things despite a relatively low consistency. There are special problems with social science journals in some nations of capital intensivity & in other nations of labor intensivity. What is of importance is how to deliver the "social science message" in its multiplicity of forms & formats. Certain experiences of the journal New Society may cast light on problems with social science journals. Social sciences attempt to come to "closer knowledge" of what is the present that we live in. In the DISCUSSION, Peter Lengyel (International Social Science Journal, Paris, France), feels that social scientists with their "heavy-footedness" are often unscrupulous for no good reason. Isac Chiva (Coll of France, Paris), asks about the possibility of confusion between that which relates to research & that which relates to technique. I. L. Horowitz believes that social scientists have accepted dualism as "essential fuel" for their professional life. Horowitz points out the notion of multiplicity & media, feeling that it is not correct to consider any one way of presenting information as absolutely inferior or superior. An important & tedious area of social science is mass communications study. R. Lent.