Nowadays we live in a world of mass media. We often believe that mass media works primarily to make our lives better than before, yet mass media has ulterior motives. Among other elements within mass media, the entertainment aspect grows to illustrate the ulterior motives behind mass media industries. Entertainment meant any action that provided entertainment or gave people the comfort of their free time. On the other hand, as many other authors have noted, entertainment is also often understood simply as something that causes the decline of moral principles (Habermas, 93). Due to the enormous impact of information, images and mass media messages, entertainment produces a society in which it is possible to distance ourselves from reality. In other words, it is a society where you are forced to believe that what you observe from the mass media is the truth. The mass media and their productions possess the power to force us to obtain misleading information, images and messages about what is moral or immoral in our cultural environment and in our socialization. Until 2000 years ago, one of the most famous philosophers, Plato, drew attention to this growing problem of the mass media taking over our reality. He firmly states that rhetoric in the form of art and performance is a threat to the moral order and should therefore be censored. In his book "Repubblica", he metaphors "sounds, images, tones and colors that shape the arts" with an object or nature that the mass media aim to represent in their media world. It also symbolizes “their inability to understand nature itself” compared to our inability to agree to question the imaginary reality that the mass media presents (Plato, 40). From his postmodern point of view, he sees art... at the center of the paper... and what is not true in reality, our civilization is affected by the decline of this moral principle. Furthermore, considering Habermas' similar view that the mass media is too governmental, we become aware of how advertising marketing holds the potential to control our emotions. Consequently, these proclamations inform us that the most influential outcome of mass media entertainment is to reject our moral principles by creating outright fabrications, producing passive citizens, and creating further behind-the-scenes agendas. Works Cited • Plato, “Republic, V and X ,” The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton, 1963, pp.712-833. • Habermas, Jurgen, “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Media Studies, Paul Marris and Sue Thronham (eds.), New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 92-97.
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