First GRE essay
Essay on the topic: "The media (books, film, music, television, for example) tend to create rather than reflect the values of a society."
The old question of whether art mimics life or life mimics art has much more relevance today. Modern communication and production technology allow media, and its arts, to reach faster a broader public. Cable television channels are seen worldwide; books, music and films can be bought (or even illegally copied) faster using InterNet and received almost in any country.
If media had no need to be profitable, its relation with society would be probably a good mixture of creating and reflecting the values of the society. The society would benefit from the reflection of its values, because people could be more aware and think about them, resulting in improvement and possibly creation of values. This healthy creation of values could be guided by the media, benefiting the society again as a kind of positive feedback.
When the need to be profitable comes into play, the media-society relation may be not as healthy, because the media may tend to create values in order to sell products or reflect distorted values of society in order to show the public what it wants to see instead of showing the truth.
As an example of distorted reflection of reality and creation of values, there are Brasilian Soap-Operas, in which the stories are always based on middle-high class society. Poor minorities are under-represented in the stories, since the goal is to entertain the rich classes of people and show them what is new to buy.
This harmful relation can only be susteinably limited by giving proper education to the people, so they can think critically about what they read, listen or watch and decide by themselves if the values shown are true or distorted or created.
