Sayre, Shay
King, Cynthia
2010
Entertainment and Society: Influences, Impacts, and Innovations

Some good quotes, but I don’t like the general lines and reasoning of the book.

Check out good Foreword by Jennings Bryant.

4f
Definition-entertainment:
“The word entertainment has a Latin root meaning “to hold the attention of,” or “agreeably diverting.” Over the years it has come to refer to a constructed product designed to stimulate a mass audience in an agreeable way in exchange for money. Entertainment can be a live or mediated experience that has been intentionally created, capitalized, promoted, maintained, and evolved. In other words, entertainment is created on purpose by someone for someone else. Entertainment is easily located, accessed, and consumed. And of course, entertainment is also attractive, stimulating, sensory, emotional, social, and moral to a mass audience.
And it is a business with specific components, as explained here. Entertainment may exist as a product, service, or experience. Entertainment products can be tickets to live performances and events; or they can be mediated programs and films that we receive in print or electronically. Television and movies are industries completely dedicated to creating entertainment as a product.
The travel and hospitality industries offer services to tourists and visitors; venues also offer services to audiences of sports, attractions, and activities. Services are designed to make entertainment pleasant for its consumers and audiences. What makes entertainment different than products and services is its experiential component. Unlike products and services, experiences are perishable—they last only as long as we are participating or watching—and intangible—they are of the moment and have ever-changing content.”
-> Even a book is an experience.

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“As a capitalist product, entertainment is developed to make money—there is always a bottom line to consider.”

“Entertainment is not […] art, although it may aspire to and attain the level of art at times”

“Entertainment’s four constituents are producers who understand the process of putting products together, creationists who are actively involved in creating a particular product, promoters who sell the products, and consumers who pay for entertainment’s many products, services, and experiences.”
-> Good intentions, but I don’t like this at all.

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“Although the leisure triad [recreation, entertainment, amusement] is used in some industry categorization, a better way to view the entertainment industry is as being content-based. Entertainment content comes to audiences in three distinct ways: as live performance (theater, musical concerts), as media (movies and TV), and as interactive experiences (recreation, amusement parks, travel, and gaming). In this text, the term experience characterizes all forms of entertainment content.”

15
“We can experience entertainment in four ways—passively absorbing [passive entertainment], educational learning [educational entertainment], complete engagement [escapist entertainment], and esthetic appreciation [esthetic entertainment].”

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“As a scarce resource, attention is the most sought-after commodity of entertainment marketers.”
-> There’s a logical problem here: economists see resources on the production side, not on the consumption side. Here, the producer would have to pay the consumer for his attention. Doesn’t make sense.

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“If something is boring, we don’t pay attention to it. Entertainment captures attention. As a result, an attention economy is also an entertainment economy.”
-> Logic again. There are also other ways to capture attention. If you’re hungry, food captures your attention. If you’re broke, money does. Etc. This is not the way to prove we’re living in an entertainment economy!

26
“Marketing is the means by which the whole culture is searched for potential meanings that can be changed by entertainment into paid-for experiences.”
-> WHAT?

80
“Interesting experiences or information are often designed to make us think but, with entertaining experiences, a more significant emphasis seems to be placed on making us feel. And, to make us feel, entertainers create drama.”

“Drama is the driving force of many forms of entertainment. Genres such as suspense, tragedy, comedy, and mystery are typically considered to be specialized forms of drama. Although dramatic genres are traditionally associated with books, films, TV programs, and live performances, elements of drama can be found in most forms of entertainment, from video games and sporting events to music and dancing. Thus, it might be argued that good entertainment hinges on good drama.”

82
“”To fully explore any issue, an author has to examine all possible solutions to that issue and make an argument to prove to an audience that the author’s way is best. If you leave out a part of that argument or diverge from the point, your story will have plot holes or inconsistencies. Once you have covered every angle in your argument, you’ve mapped all the ways an audience might look at that problem and, therefore, all the ways anyone might look at that problem. In short, you have created a map of the mind’s problem solving process.”
When a story fully develops this model of the mind, they call it a Grand Argument Story because it addresses the problem from all sides. Characters, plot, and theme are outlined as essential elements of the “story mind.”
He quotes from Melanie Phillips and Chris Huntley ~ Dramatica.