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  3. In the Information Age, the mass media have been playing an ever more important role in shaping our society. In the following ex

In the Information Age, the mass media have been playing an ever more important role in shaping our society. In the following ex

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问题     In the Information Age, the mass media have been playing an ever more important role in shaping our society. In the following excerpt, the author lists the benefits as well as the setbacks brought about by the mass media. Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
    1. summarize briefly the author’s opinion about the mass media:
    2. give your comment.
    Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
    We are told the mass media are the greatest organs for enlightenment that the world has yet seen: that in Britain, for instance, several million people see each issue of the current affairs programme, Panorama. It is true that never in human history were so many people so often and so much exposed to so many intimations about societies, forms of life attitudes other than those which obtain in their local societies. This kind of exposure may well be a point of departure for acquiring certain important intellectual and imaginative qualities, width of judgment, and a sense of the variety of possible attitudes. Yet in itself such exposure does not bring intellectual or imaginative development. It is no more than the masses of stone which lie around in a quarry and which may, conceivably, go to the making of a cathedral. The mass media cannot build the cathedral, and their way of showing the stones does not always prompt others to build. For the stones are presented within a self-contained and self-sufficient world in which, it is implied, simply to look at them, to observe—fleetingly—individually interesting points of difference between them, is sufficient in itself.
    Life is indeed full of problems on which we have to—or feel we should try to—make decisions, as citizens or as private individuals. But neither the real difficulty of these decisions, nor their true and disturbing challenge to each individual, can often be communicated through the mass media. The disinclination to suggest real choice, individual decision, which is to be found in the mass media, is not simply the product of a commercial desire to keep the customers happy. It is within the grain of mass communication. The organs of the Establishment, however well-intentioned they may be and whatever their form(the State, the Church, voluntary societies, political parties), have a vested interest in ensuring that the public boat is not violently rocked, and will so affect those who work within the mass media that they will be led insensibly towards forms of production which, though they go through the dispute and enquiry, do not break through the skin to where such enquiries might really hurt. They will tend to move, when exposing problems, well within the accepted cliche assumptions of the society and will tend neither radically to question these cliches nor to make a disturbing application of them to features of contemporary life. They will stress the "stimulation" the programs give, but this soon becomes an agitation of problems for the sake of the interest of that agitation itself: they will therefore, again, assist a form of acceptance of the status quo. There are exceptions to this tendency, but they are uncharacteristic.
    The result can be seen in a hundred radio and television programs as plainly as in the normal treatment of public issues in the popular press. Different levels of background in the readers or viewers may be assumed, but what usually takes place is a substitute for the process of arriving at judgment. Programs such as this are noteworthy less for the "stimulation" they offer than for the fact that that stimulation(repeated at regular intervals) may become a substitute for, and so a hindrance to, judgments arrived at and tested in the mind and on the pulses. Mass communications, then, do not ignore intellectual matters: they tend to castrate them, to allow them to sit on the side of the fireplace, sleek and useless, a family plaything.
    Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
选项
答案 My Views on the Mass Media Undeniably, the mass media have been greatly influencing our life. However, in essence, they don’t prompt intellectual development for the sake of their poor power of offering solutions to our real troubles in real life. This inability lies in the grain of communication which has been invented to pacify rather than agitate the masses. So with few exceptions, the mass media, instead of stirring intellect among their users, choose to castrate it, making themselves useless pastimes. A century or so ago, a book named The Crowd written by Gustave Le Bon shocked the world into a new recognition about the role the controlling power played in influencing the masses. A century later, that controlling power puts on a new vest and calls itself the mass media. While we hail the juggernaut of information thanks to its ubiquity, more sober minds worry about the suffocating whiff the mass media puff. More often than before, we witness several reversals of the same story publicized by the media, which is so twisting that it can rank a Hollywood movie. Due to their haste to catch the public attention, many mass media lose their professionalism of accuracy to rash reports. For example, some irresponsible editors base their reports on unreliable sources to cry wolf to cater to the prying eyes, only to make themselves subject to later mockery. Worse still, owing to the strict censorship, the so-called visceral truth-telling may turn out to be a thinly or thickly veiled lie to serve some purposes. " So wicked it looks loyal: so fake it looks real" speaks true of some if not many pieces of information the mass media presented. All in all, bad omens though these may sound from doom-mongers, the mass media, as the most powerful mouthpiece of one group or another, cannot withdraw themselves from us. It is us, who are equipped with better-nurtured minds, that should choose to digest the news they offer.
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