Study On The Public Spirit And Its Cultivation

Public spirit is the basic quality of virtue that "modern people" should possess and it is an important part of the socialist core value system. It is the essential element of social development and human progress. However, the meaning of "public spirit" is not always clear. On the one hand, it is regarded as a "universal vocabulary" applied to all areas of public life including economy, politics, culture and so on, explaining the related state of people in real life. On the other hand, it still can not find the "sense of belonging", it often uses as synonyms or be replaced by some other concepts like "public morals" and "citizen spirit". Although our understanding of "public spirit" is not the same, the understandings of the importance of "public spirit" and the sense of facing its threatening are consistent. With the development of technology, people put forward the idea that "entire media leads to public spirit declining", many people agreed, they think media should bear the main responsibility for the lack of public spirit.What is public spirit? What influence does the media make on public spirit and whether it is the main cause of the decline? What is the relation between the media and public spirit? This article tries to find a feasible path to cultivating public spirit via the research and discussion on these issues. In order to accomplish this task, I will discuss and analyze the issue with five parts.The first part is "introduction". This section mainly includes the reason of the selected topic and the review of research on public spirit. It also contains the perspective and methods of the research.The second part is about the content and the status of "public spirit". The section will explicit the definition of public spirit; analysis the difference between the public spirit and public morality, civic spirit and so on. It will clarify the connotation of public spirit further. The article points out that current situation of the public spirit is the poorness of "public" and the weakness of self expression. It mainly exists in three situations:no clear distinction between public and private, the ignorance on the public field, and irrational self expression in public field. Self expression in public field is not included.The third part is whether the "media" is the culprit of public spirit decline or growth field? This section briefly introduces media. It is in the view of "silence spiral" which explains the reasons why people form the idea that it is the media that leads the decline of public spirit.Furthermore, the section admits the negative impact on the public spirit that media brings to to some extent. The article holds the idea that it is not reliable to regard the media as a culprit cause which ignores the "man" (the person who sets the agenda). As long as we pay attention to the man and develop initiative of human beings, the media will become the public spiritual growth field.The fourth part discovers the reason why public spirit is poor in a penetrating way. Since the media is not the main reason of the lack of the public spirit, who is the culprit? This section summarizes three reasons of the lack of the public spirit, respectively are the influence of standard of ethics towards the traditional social formation, the impact of "only economy-centered theory", and the effect brought by the part- imbalance of media system.The last part is the cultivation strategy of public spirit in media age. Towards the reasons of the lack of public spirit, the section proposes three solutions. That is insisting on the combination of virtue and the rule of law, and constructing modern group life; improving the socialist core value system and trying to breakthrough the concept of the" only economy-centered theory"; purifying and improving the system of media.