Media & Opportunities in the Work Place

Introduction

The media is an important aspect of life in our culture. About 95% of people own a TV set and watch for an average of 3- 4 hours per day. By the end of the last century over 60% pf men and 50% of women read a newspaper each day and nearly half of all girls, from the age of 7 read a girls magazine each week. In addition, people interact with a wide variety of other media such as music delivered by cds or videos, and communications via personal computers.

Each form of medium has a different purpose and content. The media seek to inform us, persuade us, entertain us, and change us. The media also seeks to engage large groups of people so that advertisers can sell them products or services by making them desirable. Other institutions such as Governments also engage the public via the media to make ideas and values desirable. Institutions from politics to corporations can use the media to influence our behaviour. We can trace our involvement with the media back to the drum messages of the Indians, the shouts of the town crier. All that has changed are the multitudinous ways in which information passes to us and the increasing sophistication of the media providers.

The argument about whether the media shape society or merely reflect current or nascent trends is constantly under debate.

Thesis Statement: The effect of mass media promotes a tendency to associate with beauty, and the tendency creates a barrier to equal opportunities in the relationship or in the workplace.

The Cause of the Lookism

The first reason is economic effect, and the second one is the effect of mass media. After World War II, the U.S. has built up a great amount of wealth in the country, and thus it has given people the new life styles. Since people can live more comfortable off than before, they have been able to have an increasing interest in new life styles that they had not been able to do before. The investment in external appearance can be the one of them.

That is, people have started using their appearance as a tool for expressing their uniqueness. On top of that, in 2000s, the widespread of the Internet and digital cameras has enabled people to photograph, and share themselves all over the place. The result of the freedom of share also gave teenagers opportunities to judge their appearance by netizen, posting their pictures or clips on the Web such as Facebook, Youtube.com. In this sense, it is no wonder that the syndrome was molded by the diffusion of technologies and the spontaneous activities of teenagers. However, what made this worse is that mass media have tried to make ideal standards of beauty through many mass media formats, and merchandise them with the syndrome. Not only that, but also after John Ayto defined this syndrome in the Oxford''s 20th Century Words as, “prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of appearance” ...