Abstract
Entertainment plays a significant role in our culture. The entertainment industries generate billions of dollars each year, and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Yet entertainment has too often been dismissed with surprising ease within the academy, and seen as unworthy of serious analysis. This chapter sets out to explain how entertainment differs from other types of culture, why it is a useful term for defining domain of study, the limitations associated with medium-specific approaches, and why entertainment should be better understood.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I have preserved the original spelling, punctuation and line breaks here for the sake of accuracy.
- 2.
I do not use this term flippantly or only for rhetorical effect. In a faculty forum to discuss the introduction of an Entertainment Industries degree at the university where I work, one colleague vocalised ethical concerns because, in their view, entertainment is effectively ‘brainwashing’ people.
- 3.
Alan McKee (2013) has demonstrated that there exist well-documented histories of the divergence of art and entertainment as cultural forms in the course of the nineteenth century.
- 4.
Though the caption to this image tells us what they’re watching – a game of cricket – that that is not apparent in the image itself demonstrates even further that the defining characteristic is not the content, but its orientation towards, and impact on, those consuming it.
- 5.
My favourite exemplar of this mindset is British novelist Martin Amis who once said (in Page 2011) that ‘the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable’.
References
Bird, S. E. (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World, Routledge: London.
Gray, J. (2010) ‘Entertainment and Media/Cultural/Communication/Etc. Studies’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 811–817.
McKee, A. (2013) ‘The Power of Art, the Power of Entertainment’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 759–770.
Moreno, J. (2016) ‘This Teen Pulled Off the Ultimate Joke at an Art Gallery’, Buzzfeed News, 26 May, https://www.buzzfeed.com/javiermoreno/people-are-loving-this-teens-art-gallery-prank.
Page, B. (2011) ‘Martin Amis: Only Brain Injury Could Make Me Write for Children’, The Guardian, 11 February, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/11/martin-amis-brain-injury-write-children.
PBS Game/Show (2014) ‘Can Video Games Be a Spiritual Experience?’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK91LAiMOio.
PwC (2016) ‘Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2016–2020’, http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/entertainment-media/outlook.html
Raven, D. (2014) ‘Teenager Who Found Dead Father’s “Ghost” on Racing Video Game Tells Moving Story’, Mirror Online, 26 August, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/teenager-who-found-dead-fathers-4111514.
Wikipedia (n.d.-a) ‘Art’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art.
Wikipedia (n.d.-b) ‘The Arts’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_arts.
Wikipedia (n.d.-c) ‘Entertainment’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment.
Wikstrom, J. (2014) ‘Player Two’, Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/162531355.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harrington, S. (2017). How Can We Value Entertainment? And, Why Does It Matter?. In: Harrington, S. (eds) Entertainment Values. Palgrave Entertainment Industries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-47289-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47290-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)