UGC NET/JRF EXAM, Mass Communication & Journalism, October-2022*

Do media Educate? How effective are the mass media in educating the people of our country? What are the 'effects' of media on 'education? These are all loaded and difficult questions on which there can be no straight cut and dry answer.

Literate and educated people benefit much more from educational media than the less literate and educated, unless the education-oriented programmes are specifically geared to the needs, interests and levels of specific groups.

This is an essential condition of any educational programme on any medium to have some kind of 'effect'. Even before groups and region can benefits from education through the press or electronic media, they will need to become 'media literate'.

Media literacy precedes or is simultaneous with the skill to learn from the media. The folk media are perhaps much more effective in promoting the message of literacy than any of the mass media.

In Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and other states, folk forms of the local region have been utilized both by voluntary social active groups and by government supported literacy campaigns.

For example, in Maharashtra, literacy campaign have used folk municipal forms such as lavani, powade, gondhal, jagaz and others. During the campaign, cultural teams went out to be different villages on Kalajanthas.

The main thrust of the messages conveyed through song, dance and discussions was literacy. However, it was reported that other issues such as mother and child care, family planning, watershed management, the problem of alcoholism and dowry, small savings and agricultural development were also conveyed.

In some campaigns, the message of literacy was spread by relating the folk forms to local festivals, akshar kandlis and akshar rangoli at the time of Diwali and Akshar Ganpathi at the time of the popular festivals of Maharashtra.

In the campaign at Sindhudurg, haldikumkum celebrations were widely used to mobilise women and to bring them together to discuss issues related to their everyday lives.

However, in all these campaigns, there were few attempts to place literacy in the context of political, social and economic structures in the rural and urban areas.

In Maharashtra, which folk musical forms was used in literacy campaigns?

The social networking site Facebook is extremly popular among college students. As of 2012, about 900 million people were members of the site and it regularly shows up among the top 10 most visited destinations on the internet.

Facebook has also become a gold mine of information for researchers. Social scientists at several universities are using Facebook data to examine such topics as self esteem, popularity and personal attraction.

Not surprisingly, Facebook has generated a few new ethical issues as well. To illustrate, researchers at Harvard University studied social relationships by secretly monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at a U.S. College.

The 1700 students involved in the project did not know they were being studied, nor had they their permission to the Harvard research team. The researchers promised that they will take steps insure the privacy of all the participants.

Does such a study violate accepted ethical standards. Federal human subjects guidelines were mainly written for an era before Facebook existed and are open to interpretation. As a result many universities have established their own, sometimes conflicting policies.

For example, the institutional review board at Indiana University will not approve research using data from social networking sites without the site's approval or the consent of those being studied.

Other universities seem to rely on the traditional principle that no consent is needed if a researcher is observing public behaviour. But is the information on Facebook public or private?

One side of this argument maintains that Facebook members have no expectations of privacy when it comes to posting information on their pages. Indeed, it appears that the prime motivation of Facebook members is to share the information.

If users choose not to use the privacy safegaurds provided by the site, what they post is fair game. On the other hand, is the assumption of no privacy expectations accurate?

A survey of Facebook members found that most expected, that their profiles would be viewed mainly by a small circle of friends- not the world in general. Sharing information in this limited context is not the same as posting something for all to see.

Further, even if Facebook members intended that the information be made public, it does not necessarily means that they consented to the information's being aggregated, coded, analyzed and distributed.

Once the data were published, even if presented only in the aggregate form, it might be possible for someone to identify the subjects involved in the research.

Indeed, once data from the Harvard University study were released, other researchers quickly identified both the college where the research was conducted and the class that was examined.

Once again, the Internet is forcing researchers to re-examine their traditional assumptions about the ethical dimensions of their research.

Why Facebook as a social networking site is extremly popular among college students?