Statium | "Minimity" popular and scientific communication

Author: Professor of the Department of Science of the School of Humanities of Liu Bing University, Director of the Science and Technology Communication and Popularity Research Center of Tsinghua University, Executive Director of the Chinese Society of Science and Technology History, and Vice President of the Chinese Book Review Society.

Publication of popular science books is an important part of scientific communication.

In recent years, in the publication of popular science books, some popular science works published in the title of book title with the names of "×× simplified history" and even "minimalist ×××" are very popular. Here, the publishers have seen the success of science book marketing with similar title in the past, so as to follow the factors of follow -up, but also involve what people are ideal in the field of scientific communication. And understanding the psychological cognition of science, at the same time, such a trend also reflects some of the current social and cultural atmosphere.

How is the pursuit of "Simplified History" books formed

If it is not particularly accurate to trace the roots, it can be said that about 30 years ago, Hawking's popular science masterpiece "Simple History of Time" was published and successful. Essence This popular science book of Hawking, as well as a series of works (including "Simple History of Time", "Universe in the Fruit", "Big Design", etc.), not only in China, but also internationally very Best -selling popular science work. The reason for its success has been discussed by many researchers, which will not be repeated here. However, in the "Simple History of Time", it is still the most famous. As far as its success is concerned, the demonstration effect of its title is naturally the most significant.

In fact, as far as the book "Simple History of Time" is concerned, although it also includes some historical content, it is not a standard historical book, and as far as its content is concerned, it is not simply. It is neither the history of "time" standards in the sense of "brief" nor the popular science work in the "simple" sense. On the contrary, it is one of its most prominent features for ordinary readers. However, this does not prevent the subsequent publishers imitation of the "title party" and use the "XX simple history" as the title of other books to cater to readers' chasing the trend of publishing the wind. Later, many books that were crowned with "brief history" and really belonged to the history of science were often not really "brief", and they did not exactly belong to the historical types of brief history that had already existed in tradition. This kind of boom is far exceeding the original "simple" to historical limits. In many popular science books that introduce scientific knowledge, they will also tend to adopt the "simple" or even "minimalist" modification in the title.

If the publisher is still understandable for market considerations, then why readers will form the recognition and pursuit of popular science books of "Brief History", and how the science effect of such books is a question of discussion.

Pozman's prediction and short video popularity

Science, in a certain definition, is a knowledge system. The grasp of specific discipline knowledge, or the explanation of specific problems, also requires some systematic knowledge support. Scientific knowledge itself is also systemic and logical. In other words, if you want to really understand science meaningfully, some laziness cannot be stolen. If you just read the "simple" (or "minimalist") works in order to save time and energy, it is likely to form a one -sided cognition of sporadic and individual knowledge, but it cannot be in the system in the system. Getting a true understanding of the essence of science in the knowledge network.

The same is true of scientific history. Although any history is also a bit of a certain sense, after all, a history still needs to show the front and back context of the development process in order to form a logical history, not just a bunch of achievements of "big events of events. "". But when writing history in the form of "brief history", one of its biggest risks is that because of "simple", it has to split the logic between the front and back of historical events, and in the end, only a bunch of historical fragments are left. Readers may know some historical events because of this, but they cannot have a meaningful understanding of the historical itself.

This actually involves the relatively impetuous social and cultural at the moment, and the utilitarian mentality in the field of science popularization. As people's life rhythm is getting faster and more tense, people naturally want to only pay the minimum time and energy to obtain the maximum popular science income. Not only science, but also on other occasions. For example, in recent years, short videos have been very popular and popular, but the fragmented knowledge spread in it has also been pointed out for many people. Earlier, in famous books such as "Entertainment to Death" and "Technical Monopoly", American communication scholar Bozman once pointed out that when the visual image dissemination replaced traditional text reading, it was serious The consequences are to make people lose the thinking process when reading text readings. Although he did not have the Internet when he raised this question, the popularity of short videos on the Internet today only verified his prophecy in a enhanced version. Between the predictions of Polizman, the popularity of short videos, and the current "minimalist" heat, the logic of the existence of problems is actually similar.

The utilitarian cultural atmosphere is not conducive to scientific communication

Of course, the complexity and simplification are also relative. In the past, there have been a tradition of writing "brief history", but we should realize that in many cases, in fact, "simple" writing is often more difficult than "Fan" writing. Essence Because it is necessary to make the problem clearly on the premise of simplification, the author needs a better understanding of the problem, deeper grasping and the more refined control of narrative, in order Earthly. In this regard, in this regard, in scientific communication, if you want to really have greater gains, you must also give up that utilitarian and speculative psychology as much as possible. There is no shortcut to go. Harvest and efforts are always correlated, and they are often proportional. To be aware of a certain impetuous and utilitarian cultural atmosphere, it is actually not conducive to effective and ideal scientific spread.

Of course, we should also avoid being deceived by the publisher under the psychology of the above psychology. For example, the three "brief history" of Israeli scholar Herraley ("Simple History History", "Future History" and "Brief History Today") are very popular recently. Although they are beyond the narrow science popularization, they are also related to popular science sex. It is worth noting that the two books of "A Brief History of Humanity", "Future History", the publisher of the Chinese translation is actually promoting the word "brief history" of the original subtitle to the title, and in the original "Brief History Today" In the title, there is no word "brief history" at all! What's more, these very thoughtful works, in the historical sense, or the popularity of views and knowledge, should not be considered "simple".

Source | Jingbao APP

Edit: Chen Jianguo

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