How many times have you reconsidered your lifestyle? How many of your decisions have been made because of what you consider to be science?
Today, lives of people in the western culture are heavily influenced by trends presented to them by media. Many of these are based on media communication of scientific results, which can be very appealing. Therefore science not only influences what our light-bulbs consist of and that cars are starting to use hydrogen instead of petroleum; it also influences our knowledge and decisions we make in our lives. The reason why we should be concerned regarding the latter is that this part of science is served to us by media, not directly from professionals, and unfortunately the picture that gets to us is often not just simplified, but also distorted. This happens because the aim of media is not only to provide information in a widely comprehensible form, but to shock and sensationalize it.
People, sure of their “truths”, mostly do not even think about the quality of their understanding. Some realize that media serve imprecise information regarding science, but this often leads to disappointment from science instead of media. My aim is to point to the problem of media communicating science in a distorted and sensational way, illustrate and analyze it. I will focus mainly on the internet, because it provides huge amount of information, is widely accessible and it is difficult to control the quality of content there.
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