Modernity was informed by the belief that scientific rationality is fundamental to understanding society. Modernity witnessed a transition from the traditional belief that the social world was informed by religion to scientific rationality. This period, known as the Enlightenment, encouraged a different way of conceiving the world by inspiring a sense of curiosity to uncover the meanings of society. Thus, this inquisitive thought-process built the foundations of SSR (Benton & Craib, 2011). However, the means of investigating human nature were limited to scientific method, forming a positivist way of appropriating society. This echoes the want for certainty that characterised modernity. Such positivism has implications for the field of SSR, as for researchers interpreting society from alternative perspectives and using non-scientific methods is crucial to help us understand the social world. Therefore, researching from a modernist perspective would limit the research lens.

To contextualise this with relation to the media in modernity, the media followed mass communication or a ‘one-to-many’ approach, meaning that knowledge claims were circulated on a wide-scale. While this is beneficial to circulate accurate information, it overlooks individualism. This reflects Foucault’s (1977) concept of power-knowledge, which suggests that those in power create and circulate knowledge to the many. Here, Foucault’s critique suggests that while knowledge circulation was thought to be transparent, it merely reflected the sociohistorical constructs of power. While this is a critique of modernity, this evaluation is relevant today due to the media’s manipulation of messages which suggests that power relations between media producers and receivers are still uneven. Contrastively, the development of technology in postmodernity has meant that simulations of authentic knowledge have been lost and distinguishing between truth and fakery is problematic; for instance, ‘fake news’. This reflects Baudrillard’s (1994) theorisation of simulacra, which suggests that knowledge claims in postmodernity have no relation to reality.