W5/WQ—Entertainment
Welcome to my main area of interest! I think everything I’ve done in my undergrad and hope to do in the future revolves around a critique of the role of Entertainment.
Think of Entertainment as its own ideology, a funnel that shapes content that incorporates it. I agree with the view of what some academics argue, which is that when Entertainment is incorporated into education, information, or any other thing, the product of this merger is that it’ll take the form of Entertainment primarily. Entertainment dominates over any medium, media, genre, technology, or industry it is implemented in. It becomes the primary way we understand life.
Now apply this definition to our modern forms of Entertainment. The allure of short-form content, lack of attention-spans, multitasking your technology use (Phone & YouTube same time), multiple monitors/split screens, constantly having headphones in playing music, constantly being stimulated by media. It’s using boring as the go-to excuse for why you aren’t able to focus in class, or at a art gallery. Not everything in life is meant to be fun, the most rewarding things rarely are.
Entertainment is the one addiction that everyone in society has. Even the ascetic is understood and ostracized for abstaining from the Entertainment. It is always the looming monster waiting to stimulate. I hope this week’s topic is interesting in that regard.
Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman (1986)
But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To say it still another way: Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.
That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to "join them tomorrow." What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights.
We accept the newscasters' invitation because we know that the "news" is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.
Good Entertainment — Byung Chul Han (2019)
Recently, there have been frequent attempts to grasp entertainment conceptually. But something about entertainment stubbornly resists conceptual markers. Hence a certain cluelessness pervades attempts to define it. This difficulty cannot simply be sidestepped with resort to history: “Often it is fruitful to start with the historical development, which many times proves more revealing than starting with a definition. Like so many other phenomena, entertainment has its origins in the eighteenth century, because only in the eighteenth century did the work and leisure time distinction in the modern sense come to exist.”
The nobility had no need of entertainment because it pursued no regular form of work. Noble amusements, such as concerts or theater performances, were “more social activities than entertainments.” No regular work means no leisure time. According to this thesis, entertainment is an activity employed to fill free time. But this is a definition of entertainment, and it is only thanks to this implicit definition that the phenomenon’s apparent historical factuality takes shape.
Only Entertainment — Richard Dyer (2005)
Entertainment’s representations have been especially concerned with temporarily providing, but also in the process defining, happiness. Goodness is more important than happiness, but only just and it is doubtful that we can be good without being happy (and vice versa). Politics is about fostering and maximizing happiness as well as goodness; we need constantly to have entertainment’s ideas and experiences of what happiness might be and to reflect on them, their implications and costs. That is why it also matters to ask what entertainment is.
Good Entertainment — Byung Chul Han (2019)
What, then, is entertainment? How shall we account for its apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: “infotainment, edutainment, servotainment, confrotainment, docu-drama”? What does this ever-protean hybrid format of entertainment call forth? Is entertainment, which is talked about so much today, actually a long familiar phenomenon that for some reason has become significant again even though it offers nothing new?
[…] Does the ubiquity of entertainment today indicate a noteworthy process, a unique experience previously unavailable? Does it mark the appearance of something extraordinary that distinguishes or explains the present day? “Everything entertainment— enough said.” But it is not so clear—indeed, it is as far as possible from clear that everything ought now to be entertainment. What is happening here? Can we speak of some kind of paradigm shift?
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception — Adorno & Horkheimer (1963)
Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the offduty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what is imprinted is the automated sequence of standardized tasks. The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association. (p.109)
Entertainment and Utopia — Richard Dyer (2005)
Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfilment’, point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism.
Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.
Entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds, as in the classic utopias of Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized. It thus works at the level of sensibility, by which I mean an affective code that is characteristic of, and largely specific to, a given mode of cultural production.
The Disneyization of Society — Alan Bryman (1999)
From the point of view of the consumer of the themed environment, theming offers the opportunity to be entertained and to enjoy novel experiences.
It is sometimes suggested that we live in an entertainment economy in which the constant exposure to forms of entertainment – most notably through television, the movies, and computer games – leads us to expect that we will be entertained even when entertainment is not the main focus of the activity. Relatedly, when so much of the consumer’s landscape is made up of homogenized, standardized fare – near identical malls, shops, restaurants – entertainment provides an additional level of enjoyment that adds a layer of charm to, and helps to differentiate, the same and the similar. Ritzer, for example, argues that theming and similar strategies help to enchant sites of consumption in an increasingly McDonaldized and hence standardized world.
Global Entertainment Media — Lee Artz (2015)
As part of the neoliberal drive to privatize everything, commercial enterprise dominates media in most countries. Privatized, commercialized media turn to advertising and subscription for profits, looking to reduce production costs at the same time. Not surprisingly, entertainment media is now the most prevalent media form in every country.
[…] Entertainment rules television, radio, and mass market periodicals, from sport, fashion, and recreation, to lifestyle, home improvement, and good housekeeping. This is now a global condition. Even factual entertainment as produced by National Geographic, Discovery, and on occasion BBC, retreats from political and historical documentaries encompassing social contexts to make slick presentations concerned with human interest, celeberity, and non-controversial subjects (Mijos, 2009).
Global Entertainment Media — Lee Artz (2015)
On first glance, entertainment may seem to be less political, less pedagogic, than news, but a closer look reveals that all entertainment carries kernels of cultural values, social norms, and political ideology. There is no such thing as “just” entertainment. All stories and images express worldviews, conceptions of humor, beliefs about gender, beauty, success, and right and wrong. Entertainment provides a perfect vehicle for transporting advertising and consumerist ideology.
Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman (1986)
What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America's consuming love-affair with television. As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.
[…] I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years. For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
