The purpose of this article is to indicate signs of the dwarfism of journalism to the infotainment dimension and to determine the potential correlation between this problem and the specific treatment of professional integrity criteria forced by, among others, the pressure of free market, what can be an attempt to answer the question about the effects of replacing the traditional paradigm of journalism with the term “media product”. The main sources of the study are the statements of journalists publishing in Poland in the last decade. In theoretical grasp, it is a kind of informative and journalistic writing on topics relevant to the recipient in the global or local perspective, reliable with the force of the author’s authority. In the journalistic self-reflection, the most often provided equivalents of the serious journalism are the quality journalism, engaged, influential, neutral (especially in the political context), local and civil. However, the two last terms are used in relation to the new quality of media directed at the information from nearby and/or edited by people, groups trusting each other, which define themselves as ones which care for something (which do not want to continue being the passive consumers of the “media chaff”).
The author's reflections on the value of information. The context is limited to the issues relevant and important for the librarians in Poland in the first decade of the 21st century. The article concerns (among others): expected attributes and features of information, information imperative, values in human and social life, knowledge as a value, mutual relations of information and knowledge, devaluation of knowledge, and misusage of the ‘knowledge' term. Answering the title question the author states, referring to sociological and axiological contexts, that we are witnessing the crisis of the value of knowledge nowadays
The author presents the features of axiomatized theories, and - as a keen supporter of a view that sociological theories can be axiomatized - suggests that informal axiomatization is most suitable for sociological theories. Departing from the rules for statement proving presented by Karl Popper the author analyses three interrelated values describing a theoretical statement: universality, precision and value of information. In this perspective theoretical statement is a statement which possesses high value of information, which has not been falsified. In the last part of the article the author undertakes a set of deductive procedures in order to axiomatize the conflict within a role and conflict of roles theory. He concludes that axiomatization leads to higher accuracy of theoretical apparatus, makes theories more valuable in explanatory and heuristic terms and allows undertaking methodological operations new to sociological theories such as theoretical reduction.
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