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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/Mass media and in particular television and computers are among these inventions of the present world which occupy most of our time. They have become indespensable as clothes or cutlery without which we are unable to perform any other actions. From our childhood we sit in front of television and watch all sorts of programmes that teach us about the world. The growing commonness of TV or computer understood as the amount of time spent with them changes the way we perceive the world. More and more we learn who we are, where we are and what is our destination from a film, a programme or information we get from computers. The evidence that mass media affect our approach to reality can be given through analysing children and their response to the phenomenon of television. Children learn how to behave through imitation, what they see they take as a pattern without considering its good and bad nature. As their system of values is not fixed yet, they hardly understand the difference and what is bad and repugnant often becomes good and enjoyable from their perspective. Television is a great source of behaviours ranging from moral to evil ones. Unfortunately the predominant part of what we see in it is socially unacceptable and immoral, moreover it does not reflect real life. On the basis of what we see today in the streets we may draw the conclusion that films do not tell about life but they create life. What is going in the film seems to find its realization in one or the other form in the streets. Directors do not care about the impact of their films upon human psyche, they force into films a lot of murders, violent attacks and cruel behaviours in order to make them more attractive and easier to sell. To support the claim that films or in general mass media affect the reality I can enumerate many examples that would prove its truthfulness. Violence which we often encounter in our daily life is in many cases generated by what was seen or heard in mass media like television or cinema. Especially young delinquents when asked to give their motives say that they only wanted to imitate film heroes or see whether it is such a great fun as it was in a film.