Glasgow, United Kingdom

Digital Media and Information Studies / Sociology

Integrated Master's degree
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: journalism and information
Qualification: MA
Kind of studies: full-time studies, part-time studies
Master of Arts (MA)
University website: www.gla.ac.uk
Digital
Digital usually refers to something using digits, particularly binary digits.
Digital Media
Digital media are any media that are encoded in machine-readable formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on digital electronics devices.
Information
Information is any entity or form that provides the answer to a question of some kind or resolves uncertainty. It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts. As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer.
Media
Media may refer to:
Sociology
Sociology is the scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and change or social evolution. Many sociologists aim to conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro-sociology level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.
Information
In 2007, for the first time ever, more information was generated in one year than had been produced in the entire previous five thousand years - the period since the invention of writing.
Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein, Me the media: rise of the conversation society, VINT editions (research institute of Sogeti), 2009, p. 270.
Sociology
The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists.
Richard Lewontin Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)
Information
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 18th April 1775.
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