Debord, Guy
2002 (1967)
The Society of the Spectacle
Dumbing down and keeping the people sedated so they don’t think and come up with stupid ideas like questioning the leadership.
Thesis 25
“The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness [...]” until eventually “[...] all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated [...]“
Vorderer, Peter
Steen, Francis F.
Chan, Elaine
2006
Motivation in Bryant, J et al ~ Psychology of Entertainment
3
“Why do human beings, across a range of different cultures and historical periods, seek out and enjoy the experience of entertainment? Why do they select and create certain types of situations – and not others – to entertain themselves? Why do they seek entertainment so often, fur such long periods of time, and in so many different situations and settings? To ask these questions is to adopt the perspective that entertainment is a response to a certain set of opportunities rather than a feature of a particular media product itself.”
Zillmann, Dolf
Vorderer, Peter
2000
Media Entertainment: The Psychology of its Appeal
vi
“In fact, entertainment offerings obtrusively dominate media content and are bound to do so in the foreseeable future. This circumstance, together with the apparent growing public demand on entertainment provisions, lend equal justification to characterizing the present times as the ‘entertainment age.’”
vif
“More systematic inquiry is necessary to determine what it is that people deem gratifying and that brings about desired experiential states. The entertainment needs of vastly diverse audiences with vastly diverse intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional interests will have to be explored with increasing care and rigor. Most importantly, however, more attention, in terms of both theory and research, must be directed at understanding the basic mechanisms of enlightenment from, and emotional involvement with, the various forms of entertainment. As yet to be comprehended fully are, for instance, the means of making people laugh and cry, feel the sadness and happiness of others, share their terror and triumph, or simply, of generating calming or thrilling sensations and experiences of serenity or elation. It is astounding, in fact, how little genuine scholarship and basic research has addressed questions as fundamental as exactly what it is that gives comedy the power to make people laugh and tragedy the power to make them cry. It is also far from clear how it can be possible that mere spectators feel triumphant or depressed when seeing athletic competition between others go one way or the other, or, what empowers music to make listeners shudder or feel glorious.”
vii
“Fortunately, a more systematic exploration of media entertainment is beginning. Psychologists, sociologists, and communication scholars, in particular, have begun to replace speculations with meticulous assessments of the content and usage of many forms of entertainment and their effects on different types of people, ultimately, of their consequences for society. For the first time, the primary function of media entertainment – namely, attainment of gratification – takes center stage in this exploration. Specific theories have been proposed to elucidate issues of emotionality and enjoyment, and numerous research demonstrations have been published to clarify the appeal of all conceivable genres and subgenres of media offerings.”
Hügel, Hans Otto
1993
Ästhetische Zweideutigkeit der Unterhaltung: Eine Skizze ihrer Theorie
128
Definition-entertainment:
“Dieses Verharren der Unterhaltung in der Schwebe von Ernst und Unernst möchte ich als Zweideutigkeit fassen. Ästhetisch wird diese Zweideutigkeit genannt, weil es bei Unterhaltung nicht nur auf sinnliche Wahrnehmung ankommt, sondern weil die Wahrnehmung durch Formensprache strukturiert ist. Der Unterhaltungswert eines Fußballspiels z.B. hängt von der Qualität des Spiels ab, für die die Zuschauer Blick und Maß haben.”
-> An entertainer does not pretend it is real (it is clear that it’s all fiction), but he acts as if it were real. An audience member knows it is not real, but pretends he believes it is. Zweideutig, because entertainment at any point in time is sending out two messages: what you see is real AND what you see is not real.
138
“Solche Unterhaltung gehört nicht schon immer zur menschlichen Kultur.”
“Jedenfalls läßt sich nicht von einem allgemeinen menschlichen Zug zur Unterhaltung sprechen, aus dem historisch-spezifische Erkenntnisse abzuleiten wären.”
“Folgt man dem hier vorgeschlagenen Begriff von Unterhaltung, fallen alle Genres des Unterhaltsamen, die dominant zur Vergewisserung sozialer Identität genutzt werden oder deren Produzenten, wie die ‘fahrenden Leute’ im Mittelalter, sozial diskriminiert waren, aus der Geschichte der Unterhaltung heraus. Denn das Verständnis von Unterhaltung als ästhetisch zweideutigem Vorgang setzt ihre Emanzipation voraus. Zu den Voraussetzungen von Unterhaltung zählen daher neben der sozialen Gleichberechtigung der Unterhaltungskünstler vor allem noch die Entstehung einer populären Kultur – deren Teilnahme nicht mehr auf die Herstellung sozialer Identität ausgerichtet ist – und die Entwicklung von Medien, die Unterhaltung im Sinne von Günter Anders Welt als Phantom zur Erfahrung bringen. Daß die historische Epoche der Unterhaltung mit dem Aufkommen der Familienzeitschriften 1850 beginnt, dafür spricht, wie ich an anderer Stelle dargelegt habe (Hügel 1992), einiges. Wann die Epoche der Unterhaltung endet? – Wir werden es noch erleben.“
Gray, Jonathan
2008
Television Entertainment
3
“Entertainment is a concept of great familiarity to anyone capable of smiling. While we may struggle to define it in the abstract, we know it when it happens.”
3f
“we can make a crude division between programming whose primary aim is to entertain, to inform and educate, or to sell, which subsequently divides the television world into: (a) entertainment programming (b) news, documentaries, and educational programming and (c) advertisements. Of course, ads frequently hope to sell precisely by entertaining, and a rare few – such as public service announcements – sell by informing and educating.The news, meanwhile, is increasingly becoming entertainment driven, with stories on Paris Hilton’s or Britney Spears’ meltdowns trumping news of diplomatic missions and policy debates. Some of the best educational programming, too, from Sesame Street to Blue Planet, is wonderfully entertaining, and, as I will argue, entertainment often informs and educates.” -> But really they are inseparable.
4
“Beyond quoting the OED or Zillmann and Bryant, I find it remarkably hard to offer a value-neutral definition of entertainment, since it is one of the most automatically moralized concepts. Entertainment can be a compliment or a profanity, and it can represent transcendence or corruption, salvation or sin, depending upon the speaker. Thus, for instance, even the OED’s first example for the word entertainment – “everyone just sits in front of the television for entertainment” (emphasis added) – offers an implicit evaluation and criticism of entertainment and of the act of watching it.”
6
“Summarizing, entertainment’s critics launch three major attacks. First, we see great fear of the incredible powers of television entertainment. Entertainment is posited either as a great ill in and of itself, as capable of masking comparably great ills, or as so completely devoid of content, meaning, and/or value that our culture’s love affair with it is seen as the ultimate waste of time and human potential. Second, entertainment is placed in stark and clear opposition to information and education. When writers talk of entertainment “creeping” into information, they employ the imagery of invasion, rival armies, and unlawful occupation. Finally, particularly when metaphors of narcosis are used, entertainment’s viewers or “users” are frequently seen as unreliable around such a stimulus, and as slaves to their/our addiction, hence meaning that entertainment plus humans equals a troublesome combination.”
13
“Introductory media textbooks are often divided into sections on the media studies’ holy trinity of texts (by which is meant programs/shows),industry (production), and audiences (viewers).”
Dyer, Richard
2002
Only Entertainment
1
“Entertainment is an idea, one that is both historically and culturally specific. While pleasure has surely always been intended and taken in artefacts and performances, the idea of entertainment is distinctive in its emphasis on the primacy of such pleasure, ahead or even instead of practical, sacred, instructional or political aims and functions. This is touched on in chapters 2 and 5 (‘The idea of entertainment’, ‘Entertainment and utopia’). Cultural developments since 1900 suggest that entertainment, at any rate in the forms discussed here, may also be historically specific in another sense, namely that it may now be on the way out, and this is addressed in a brief, speculative concluding essay, ‘The waning of entertainment’.”
“[Art] either seeks to denigrate entertainment because it is not art (not formally perfect, accomplished or innovative, not emotionally deep, with nothing interesting to say about the world) or tries to show that such-and-such an instance of entertainment is really, or also, art; either way, the issue of what entertainment is is side-stepped.”
“Discussion of ideology on the other hand tends to treat entertainment as a sugar on the pill of ideological messages, either condemning it as a disguise for world views of which the writer disapproves or else commending it as a strategy for promoting those of which she or he does approve. Once again, though, what entertainment is is not addressed.”
2
“the fact that an entertainment entertains does not let it off the hook of social responsibility, does not make up for sexism, racism or any other deleterious ism.”
3
“My polemical intent with these brief pieces (and the references to the news as entertainment in ‘Entertainment and utopia’) is to unsettle the assumption that things that enjoy high cultural prestige are not in fact informed by the same entertainment values as those that are not – perhaps the former are just entertainment for highbrows.”
-> Art is entertainment for the high-brows.
“However I do also suspect that, amid all the current academic discussion of pleasure, desire, jouissance and carnival, entertainment is still not taken seriously as a topic.”
6
“If all these things can be entertainment, then clearly entertainment is not so much a category of things as an attitude towards things.”
“Entertainment became identified with what was not art, not serious, not refined. This distinction remains with us – art is what is edifying, élitist, refined, difficult, whilst entertainment is hedonistic, democratic, vulgar, easy. That the distinction is harmful, false to the best in both what is called art and what is called entertainment, has often been commented upon. But it remains one built into our education and, as we shall see, the decisions of television programmers.”
”
19
“It is important, I think, to stress the cultural and historical specificity of entertainment. The kinds of performance produced by professional entertainment are different in audience, performers and above all intention to the kinds of performance produced in tribal, feudal, or socialist societies.”
Definition-entertainment:
“entertainment is a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the ‘public’), by a trained, paid group who do nothing else but produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing pleasure.”
19f
“Because entertainment is produced by professional entertainers, it is also largely defined by them. That is to say, although entertainment is part of the coinage of everyday thought, none the less how it is defined, what it is assumed to be, is basically decided by those people responsible (paid) for providing it in concrete form. Professional entertainment is the dominant agency for defining what entertainment is.”
20
“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.”
175
“Entertainment of the kind discussed in these pages depends for its forms and appeals on the notion of escapism, and this in turn entails a sense of there being something that is not entertainment, that needs to be escaped from. Entertainment is thus apart, different, special, a treat. Yet the bases for that sense of entertainment have undergone such profound alterations in the past half-century that entertainment may now be ceasing to be a viable cultural category.”
“There is no decline, for those with money and access, in the taking of pleasure. On the contrary, we may have entered the most hedonistic period the world has ever known. The word entertainment can be, and always has been, used to speak of the many ways in which people may take pleasure – we entertain people with dinner, in jokes and gossip, we entertain ourselves in hobbies and sports. In this widest sense there is no decline in entertainment; indeed, quite the reverse. What may be in eclipse, though, is the provision of entertainment in artefacts and performances based on a dynamic of separation and escape. This can be traced in technological, geographic and social developments as well as in changes in the content and forms of the arts and media.”
“Before the 1920s, entertainment was something you went to or perhaps did at home on special occasions.”
“The gramophone and radio were the first technologies to alter this.”
176
“with the internet, performance is not even necessarily professionally provided (except by technicians facilitating commercial web sites) – music, drama, all kinds of performances and visual expressions are now as likely to be amateur as professional, and anyone may be both a provider and a consumer of entertainment.”
-> Mention produsage here?
“These changes in the time and place of pleasurable performances are of a piece with changes in the social organization of production and consumption.”
-> Workplaces like Facbook or Google look more fun than work. Work in the entertainment industries has often become extremely dry and bureaucratic instead of a love of doing it. Childcare is not entirely at home or supported by the community (hippies), it’s bits of everything with working moms.
177
“Along with these socio-techno-geographic changes go widespread cultural changes. Entertainment has got in everywhere.” -> Entertainment economy/culture/whatever.
“And, to the degree that everything becomes entertainment, entertainment itself ceases to be a category.”
“Entertainment classically dealt in glamour, utopia, the exotic, the extraordinary, the exceptional, enjoyment through imagining other worlds or ways of being. However, through the twentieth century, people increasingly wanted to take pleasure in people like themselves, realities like their own.”
178
“The subject matter of entertainment is no longer how much more beautiful or exciting life could be but rather an assurance that life as it is is entertaining.”
179
“This is why I speak of entertainment waning, since this both emphasizes the gradualness of the process and, if the metaphor holds true, of the possibility of it being a temporary phase before entertainment waxes again.”
“the eclipsing of entertainment represents a closing of the gap between an awareness of what is and imagination of what could or should be.”
“the waning of entertainment risks weakening the ability to be critical of the way things are by feeling how else they might be. And the way things are is that some can live a life that does not need its moments of entertainment while most labour to make it possible. The waning of entertainment might merely confirm the comfortable overclass of Western society in the rightness of its life while extinguishing even the tawdriest visions of happiness for the rest of the world.”
Butler, Des
2010
The borders that law sets on entertainment
855
“Collectively the laws relevant to entertainment may be described by the label ‘entertainment law’. However, there is no specialist set of laws which apply specifically to entertainment industries. Instead, the laws that are relevant to entertainment are drawn from a collection of different areas that can have an impact on all phases of the entertainment process. These include the creation phase such as writing, composing or designing; the transaction phase such as communicating, publishing or exhibiting; and the consumption phase such as viewing, reading or listening.”
Bosshart, Louis
Macconi, Ilaria
1998
Introduction in Bosshart, L et al ~ Media Entertainment
3
“The reason lies, instead, in the scant attention paid by serious researchers to theories of entertainment. There is simply no positive correlation between the amount of entertainment that is consumed and the amount of scholarly research in the field of entertainment. More ‘noble’ topics, such as the interactions of media and democracy, attract much mainstream research. but “mere entertainment” seems too humdrum for serious attention.”
Bryant, Jennings
2010
Foreword in Sayre, S et al. ~ Entertainment and Society: Influences, Impacts, and Innovations
XXI
“The resulting phenomenon has numerous dimensions, the sum total of which has led some scholars to suggest that we’re living in the entertainment age (Zillmann and Vorderer, 2000). Others have emphasized the dysfunctional aspects of the entertainment explosion and have lamented that we are Amusing ourselves to death (Postman, 1985).”
“The concomitant proliferation in entertainment scholarship has evoked abundant changes in the academy.”
XXII
“Such developments indubitably have laid waste to Fischer and Melnik’s (1979) claim that “theories of entertainment per se are practically nonexistent” (p. xi). Moreover, the widespread acceptance of the myriad theories of entertainment presented and refined in these volumes casts considerable doubt on Freud’s century-old dictum that “we do not know what it is that gives us pleasure and what we laugh about” (p. 107).”
Weiler, Paul C.
2002
Entertainment, Media, and the Law: Text, Cases, Problems
2
“Entertainment is a human activity and economic venture. Its internal relationships and products are, of course, shaped by contract, as well as constitutional, copyright, labor, antitrust, and trade law. Yet every one of those branches of the law applies to other industries – to auto manufacturing for example. Professors do not, however, teach and write books about ‘automobile law’. What is distinctive about entertainment law is the unique way that many crucial features of this industry have shaped and been shaped by the legal system.“