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北京大学英语新闻网/Peking University News
―Doer‖ in mass communication. China did not have such doer at that time. The social
and political structure of China was already very stable in Northern Song Dynasty. All
the land of China belonged to the emperor and all the people were his subjects. The
emperor ruled the country by levels of civic service system, in which stands the
officials selected through imperial examination. They shared the same interests, with
no one seeking to change the existing interest structure. As for common people,
most of them had no schooling and did not realize what movable type meant to them.
It was still the same case by the end of Qing Dynasty.
One of the important functions of movable type for China is that it greatly facilitated
the preparation for imperial examinations. Hardly was the imperial examination over
when materials such as the questions, papers and their evaluations were collected
into books for candidates next year as references. A second function was that it
made the imperial examination system more and more standardized. Besides, the
two novels, which gave a panoramic picture of the feudal society of China, Jīnpíng
Méi (Golden-Vase Plums) and The Dream of Red Mansion, as well as some other
history books and stories, were widely spread thanks to the invention of movable
type. Generally speaking, however, the role of movable type in China was obviously
different from its role in the West.
China Reading Weekly: Would a new invention, when in its early stage, bring some
new social problems?
Yang Boxu:There would always be problems. Theoretically speaking, the emerging
and application of each new media would usually benefit some social classes while
hurt some others. Such problems would take different forms in different fields. It was
quite easy for them to exert themselves in political arenas, for political interests
would be clearly seen. However, it would not be so obviously felt in social level. For
example, when Television appeared in the West, Western scholars of positivism
school in mass communication studies paid great attention to the impact of TV
programs on children. They worried about the influence of sex and violence
elements displayed in TV programs on children‘s later behaviors. The criticism
school, on the other hand, worried about the one-way communication mode of
television and radio, which cultivated the one-way communication audience. In
one-way communication, the audience cannot express their opinions, always
passively receiving the information from those possessing the resource. If it goes on
like this, the audience would become muddle-headed sooner or later and would have
no imagination at all. This would harm the development of the country. We know that
it is difficult to explain the impact of TV programs on audience from the positivistic
perspective, but how can the worries of the criticism school-the audience would be
muddle-headed, be proved?
However, the problems raised by these two schools sounded warnings to us, for,
after all, the mode of mass communication through TV and radio is not a much
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