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Blog #4: Social Media, YouTubers, and So Much More

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The Internet not only changed the way we consume entertainment sources like radio and TV, but it created new forms of entertainment all its own. So much so that Internet-specific entertainment is now an entertainment culture of its own, full of celebrities and large profits. In this post, we’ll look at different forms of Internet entertainment and discuss how they change the way we entertain ourselves. It is important to note at this point that I’m not including things like Netflix because I previously discussed websites like that. One form of entertainment that has truly permeated our entire culture is social media. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others transcend many cultural and social barriers. Some studies have shown that the average person spends nearly an hour on social media sites per day! These sites help us stay connected and make new connections in a way that could never have been imagined two decades ago. While these may not seem like entertain...
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Blog #3: Video Killed the Radio Star

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          With all due respect to the wonderful radio, the television was the foremost entertainment technology of the 20 th century. Television shaped so much of the culture and still does to this day. Where the Internet did not take from radio that much, Internet entertainment has much for which to thank the TV.            It is hard to establish the dominance of the TV and its ubiquitous nature for modern American history. Suffice it to say that, according an NYU article on the History of Television, before 1947 the number of U.S. homes with television sets could be measured in the thousands. By the late 1990s, 98 percent of U.S. homes had at least one television set, and those sets were on for an average of more than seven hours a day . There are TV programs today for every single subject you could ever want. There are TV shows that talk about what is happening elsewhere on TV. The television shaped our entertainment culture...
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Blog #2: Tune In and Tune Out

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The Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi  is largely credited with the invention of the radio system in the last decade of the 19 th century. Less than half a century later, nearly every home in the United States and homes across the world had their own personal radios. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the home radio was the dominant entertainment medium, and this era in the US is known as the Golden Age of Radio. Though we may scoff at such an idea now, the notion that you could communicate audibly with people a long distance away was surely a revolutionary idea. In the world of entertainment, communication and entertainment are often inextricably linked together and this is absolutely the case when it comes to radio. It revolutionized entertainment and, in my opinion started our modern trend towards entertainment culture .             Radio was a true entertainment medium, filled with original programming in all k...
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Blog #1: Does Reading the Dictionary Count as Entertainment? The What and Why of Entertaining Ourselves

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Entertainment. Who needs it? The short answer is: we do. You do. I do. Every single person needs entertainment in some capacity. To imagine a world void of entertainment is to imagine a world void of human existence. While that statement may seem a bit hyperbolic, think about it. Every day, we are finding creative ways to entertain ourselves and finding entertainment in all kinds of situations. To seek entertainment is to be human, in a way. This is partly why I am so interested in this topic. Because entertainment is so fundamental to our humanity, the examination of how we entertain ourselves delves into some philosophical territory. The study of entertainment taps into our core needs and desires. But think about this for a second: what exactly IS entertainment? Could you define it? Do you know it when you see it? We’ll get to that a little later in this post, so stay tuned.             Each of use relies on entertainment e...
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