Ulterior Motives of Mass Media behind their Production

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We live in a world of mass media in these modern days. We often believe that mass media functions mostly to make our life better than before, yet, mass media have ulterior motives. Among other elements within mass media, aspect entertainment grows to illustrate the ulterior motives behind mass media industries. Entertainment used to indicate any action that supplies a recreation or offers people to have well being of their leisure time. On the other hand, as many other authors have noted, entertainment is often also simply understood as something which causes the decline of moral principles (Habermas, 93). Due to the enormous impact of information, images, and messages from mass media, entertainment produces a society in which you can get away from reality. In other words, it is a society in which you are forced to believe what you observe from mass medium is the truth. Mass media and their productions possess the power to force us obtain deceptive information, images and message about what is moral or immoral in our cultural environment and our socialization. As far as 2000 years ago, one of the most famous philosophers, Plato, paid close attention to this growing problem of mass media conquering our reality. He firmly asserts that rhetoric in the form of arts and performance is a threat to the moral order, and should therefore be censored. In his book the "Republic," he metaphors “sounds, sights, tones and colors that shapes arts” to an object or nature that mass media aims to depict in their media world. He also symbolizes “their incapability to apprehend the nature itself” to our inability to take in for questioning the imaginary reality that mass media presents (Plato, 40). From his postmodern point of view, he sees the art... ... middle of paper ... ...r what is not true of the reality, our civilization is affected by the decline of this moral principle. Furthermore, by considering Habermas’s similar point of view of mass media being too governing, we become aware of how advertisements marketing possesses the potential to control our emotion. Consequently, these proclamations inform us that the most influential outcome of entertainment in mass media is to turn down our moral principles by creating fabrication true, producing passive citizens and making ulterior goals behind the scene. Works Cited • Plato, “Republic, V and X,” The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (ed.), Princeton, 1963, pp.712-833. • Habermas, Jurgen, “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Media Studies, Paul Marris and Sue Thronham (ed.), New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 92-97.

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