Blog #1: Does Reading the Dictionary Count as Entertainment? The What and Why of Entertaining Ourselves

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 every single day, multiple times a day. Humans have an innate ability to entertain themselves in various kinds of situations. How did you entertain yourself today? Did you watch multiple episodes of a new show on Netflix? Did you play a prank on a co-worker? Did you scroll through your Twitter feed to see funny tweets about the Bachelorette finale? All of these things could be rightly considered “entertainment.”
            But why do we feel the need to entertain ourselves? What about entertaining ourselves makes it seem like such a natural human desire? What kind of person seeks entertainment? If we study the why, we’ll see that two distinct reasons emerge: boredom and relaxation.
            When spirituality leader Acharya Prasant was asked “What kind of mind needs entertainment?” he responded by saying, “A restless, bored mind.” As long as humans have been alive, humans have been bored. In a way, it’s what we’re best at doing. We don’t have to try to get bored, it just comes naturally. The second best thing we’ve learned to do is to get out of that boredom. How? Entertainment! At this point, I feel obligated to include a link to scene about boredom from one of my all-time favorite movies, My Dinner with Andre  


          While the movie is entertaining, the notion of government brainwashing is fantastical. However, people will attempt near anything and everything to escape boredom. It’s what we hate most. The escape from boredom is why we look at our phones when we’re standing in a long line. It’s why we check social media multiple times an hour, just to find there’s nothing new going on. Entertainment solves the boredom problem. Entertainment, in this way, is just a good way to pass the time. I don’t mean to say this is necessarily a bad thing. It is often better to do something productive with your time than to sit around bored. But the next time you pull your phone out to alleviate 5 seconds of boredom, try putting it back in your pocket and absorb the beauty of a little bit of boredom.
            On a digital forum post entitled “Why do we need entertainment?” many people responded by saying they use entertainment to relax after a hard day at work. Our lives are so busy with so many different obligations that entertainment like a book, TV, or the Internet allows us to almost turn our brains off for a minute and unwind. In consuming entertainment, we are free of obligations and escape from responsibility.  Surely, all of us can identify with using entertainment for relaxation purposes.
It’s insightful to understand why we all need entertainment, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, we have not even yet defined what entertainment is in the first place. I’m trying to keep you in suspense…how entertaining, right? But when we try to define entertainment, we find that is a surprisingly broad and vague term used to describe so many different things. Most dictionaries define entertainment as “to hold one’s attention.” By this definition, anything that holds one’s attention is entertainment. Do we use this definition today? Yes and no. There are clear examples of entertainment on which most people would agree. A show on Netflix that keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time so you watch every episode in quick succession because you NEED to know what happens next…THAT is entertainment. A movie with a crazy plot twist or a book that keeps your interest for hours are both clearly entertainment. But what about YouTube videos from a channel called MrBeast who recorded himself reading the entire dictionary? 

Is this entertainment? Likely, the answer to that question depends on the person! If that kind of video holds your attention and keeps you interested, you would consider that entertainment. Judging by his 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, there is clearly some kind of fan base for this kind of entertainment. However, for others, probably the vast majority of people, this is the opposite of entertainment. In this example, I am hoping to show that “entertainment” is largely a subjective experience.
            But if entertainment is so subjective, how then do we arrive at the point where you and I can confidently identify a certain thing as entertainment? How can I confidently claim that Stranger Things is entertainment, but watching paint dry on a wall is not? The answer: our entertainment culture. In centuries past, the idea of entertaining oneself conjured up ideas of children playing cowboys and robbers, creating fantasy worlds of their own volition. Our more modern society has taken a different approach to entertainment. The evolution of entertainment has shifted toward this notion of an “entertainment culture.” No longer is entertaining yourself something you create, but something you consume. If you look around the world, entertainment is everywhere. It is its own business, branching anywhere and everywhere. This entertainment culture has decided what entertainment is and what it is not and has saturated us with entertainment everywhere we look. Every TV program, radio show, and a lot of Internet websites feed into our entertainment culture.  Hollywood is the home of American entertainment culture; it is the home of countless movie stars, musicians, and celebrities of all kinds. We have awards shows to recognize the best in entertainment culture. We have TV programs to report on the news about the lives of other TV stars. Again, entertainment is a business. It is a thriving culture. It is ubiquitous in the air around us. 
In many ways, we are no longer the makers of our own entertainment, but rather we are its consumers. This stems from the ways in which the entertainment culture is expressed: entertainment technologies. The greatest and most revolutionary technologies of the 20th century were the radio and the TV. As I will elaborate on in following blogs, both of these methods of entertainment are about consuming material. We don’t create our own TV shows and radio programs. This blog post will in no way make a judgment as to the merits or demerits of this shift, but simply note that the shift is apparent. This series of blogs seeks to study the primary technologies of our entertainment cultures and understand how these technologies impact the way we entertain ourselves. But that’s not quite the whole story.

              You see, our entertainment culture is also incredibly adaptable to the changing of technology across time. And it is the opinion of this blog that there is one technology that has revolutionized the way we entertain ourselves more than any other technology and it is well on its way to dominating our entire entertainment culture: the Internet. The main question behind this entire blog is this: how has the Internet changed the way we entertain ourselves? As we know it today, the Internet has both incorporated older forms of entertainment into itself and adopted entirely new forms of entertainment of its own. In short, the Internet has impacted practically every single way we entertain ourselves. The way we consume radio will never be the same. The way we consume TV content will never be the same. These blog exists to go more in depth about the nature of this impact. In blog 2 and 3, we’ll look at radio and TV, the two revolutionary sources of 20th century entertainment culture and the impact that the Internet has for we use those entertainment technologies specifically. In the fourth and final blog, we’ll explore forms of entertainment that are unique to the Internet and the reality of Internet entertainment as a profitable business, just as TV and radio. How does the Internet impact the way we entertain ourselves? It makes entertainment faster and more accessible than ever, chiefly because the Internet is available on devices of all sizes so we can carry it with us wherever we go. In the end, I hope you’ll see that when it comes to entertaining ourselves, the Internet is the perfect medium for every entertainment need.

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