Which of the following are statements made by scholars in relation to…
2024
Which of the following are statements made by scholars in relation to media-audience equations?
A. New media are natural and social
B. People are polite to well-designed computer
C. The relationship between communication gadgets and people is passive
D. The new media technology has created a kind of techno-spirit
E. The techno-media environment is an ideal environment
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer: D. A, B, C, D only — Concept The media equation, stated by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (1996), holds that people’s responses to media and to computers are fundamentally social…
- A.
A, D, E only
- B.
C, D, E only
- C.
B, C, E only
- D.
A, B, C, D only
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept
The media equation, stated by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (1996), holds that people’s responses to media and to computers are fundamentally social and natural: a person automatically applies everyday social rules — politeness, reciprocity, attributions of personality — to a machine, even while knowing perfectly well that the machine is not a person. Scholarship on media–audience relations carries two further strands around that core: the older passive-audience position, on which the human side of the relationship merely receives what the technology delivers, and accounts of new media generating a kind of techno-spirit, a quasi-animistic enthusiasm attached to the technology itself. A question of this shape therefore asks a single thing of each lettered line: has the scholarship actually asserted it, or is the line an evaluation that no scholar advances as a finding?
Application
Test each lettered statement against that concept.
Statement | Asserted in the scholarship? |
|---|---|
A. New media are natural and social | Yes — this is the core media-equation proposition itself: interactions with computers, television and new media are fundamentally social and natural. |
B. People are polite to well-designed computer | Yes — Nass’s politeness experiments: a user questioned by a computer about that same computer answers more favourably than when a second computer asks, exactly as politeness norms work between people. |
C. The relationship between communication gadgets and people is passive | Yes — the passive-audience position, long argued in media–audience scholarship, describes the human side as receiving rather than acting on the technology. |
D. The new media technology has created a kind of techno-spirit | Yes — scholars describe new media as producing a techno-spirit: enthusiasm and quasi-animistic attribution directed at the technology. |
E. The techno-media environment is an ideal environment | No — this is an endorsement, not a finding. The literature examines the techno-media environment critically and no scholar advances it as ideal. |
Four of the five lines — A, B, C and D — are statements the scholarship makes; only E is an evaluation rather than a scholarly claim. The set to choose is therefore A, B, C, D only.
Cross-check
Of the four sets offered, only the set A, B, C, D leaves E out; the other three all carry E, the one line that is an endorsement rather than a claim.
The same set is also the only one that keeps both verbatim media-equation propositions — that new media are natural and social, and that people are polite to well-designed computers — together; every other set drops at least one of them.
NTA’s official answer key for UGC NET Paper 1, 27 August 2024 Shift 2, Question 18 records A, B, C, D only as the correct response.