If to create value means to create totally new value that never exist in its current society, media is impossible to create value. Media is always derived from our society, so it always reflects and display the value already exist in our society. But, some profound works will not just simply reflect value,but extract values from our society, strengthen it and then can affect the value of our society, which will make people consider this works create value.
One innate reason that make media always reflect the value of current society is, their authors come from the current society, who are already deeply affected by the value around them. One example is what people like and feel in different times reflect in the music. 100 years ago, when more people live in the countries, life is more peaceful, and people more like quiet and simple life, country music are popular. At time that, the lyric of the country music reflect the peaceful and simple life people enjoy.
But nowadays, in our modern life, more and more people live in modern city, crowded, noisy and stressful, which make people more easily feel angry and yearn for release. So today’s pop music, reflecting our modern life, are more dynamic and quick, and most of them more noisy. Some lyric of the pop music will describe a people crying for his/her dissatisfaction and pressure from the society. Another good example that media reflect value of society is how people in different areas treat sex that affects their media.
In some religious countries, people consider sex as a taboo. People tend to not talk about it in public. So it is not easy to see authors describe sex explicitly in their works, no mention that public media will advertize this topic. But in western countries, sex for their people, is just a common and regular need in their value, so it is common to see that the medias come from western countries will even describe sex. Simply to say, books, music and all kinds of different works and value always reflect the value of the current society in their time and area.
If value totally never exist in the society, new value in media cannot be created or spread there. Although all works reflect the value of the current society, the profound works would extract and highlight the value, and apply it to affect the society where it comes from. For example, in renaissance times, lots of philosophers, thinkers and sociologists created works to diffuse their value, like ‘ people are all equal’, ‘people have the right since their birth’.
This value has long and deep effect on the public people that incited people to stand up and resist the privileged class. But these great philosophers, thinkers and sociologists can put this value into their works and spread it because this value has already existed in the society. But this value is not so strong and well-known, what this works do is to strengthen and deepen it into the society. In sum, all media come from society so reflect the value where they are derived. But in some degree, some profound works can strengthen the value and affect the society.
