Science Communication through Mass Media

Abstract

Communication is one of the lifelines of humankind. And communicating meaningful information in science is a much more challenging job than anything else. And the world over definitely a good amount of progress has been achieved throughout the years in this direction. But without an effective and convenient dissemination of such information to the persons concerned these developments are not going to yield any positive results. Nowadays mass communication has managed to rightfully acquire the prime position of the fourth basic need of human beings after food, shelter and clothes. Can we imagine any walk of life in which mass media does not play an important role in getting across necessary information to the masses concerned? Being from the field of mass communication I personally believe that the effort for the purpose has not been enough till date. In this paper I shall try to explore how to figure out the target audience / people for dissemination of these information specially in areas with difficult terrains like the North-East India, types of media available in this regard etc. This is because any human being – whether literate or illiterate, rich or poor needs to be informed, educated and persuaded about adopting and switching over to practices of using energy only from renewable sources. But media has the power and capacity to carry out this function over a given period of time. For this there is an urgent need for creating an interface between the personnel and institutions involved in this business including the scientific community, research laboratories among others. It is quite a natural that we can’t expect this community of personnel to be very media savvy. And there comes the expertise of media handy in bridging the gap between these two sides of interested parties – the scientific community and the masses. We would like to explore the scope of media intervention in disseminating these information in an effective and productive manner.