Entertainment

views updated

ENTERTAINMENT

Entertainment is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has been transformed extensively by science and technology. To some extent that transformation has ethical dimensions that merit more consideration than they usually receive.

The Historical Spectrum

There is evidence that human beings have found ways to amuse themselves since the beginning of history. Ancient Mesopotamians reserved six days a month for designated holidays, half of which were tied to religious lunar festivities. Hunting was a favorite pastime of Assyrian kings, as wall reliefs attest; that pastime was shared by Egyptian pharaohs, as is affirmed by the decorations on their tombs. Sports such as boxing and wrestling were practiced widely in the ancient world, sometimes between divine beings and men as in the struggle between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh and that between Jacob and an angel in the Hebrew Bible. Black-figure vases and amphorae indicate the Greeks' love for those two sports as well as the others featured in the ancient Olympic games and their imitators throughout the ancient Aegean world. A variety of board games from ancient times (e.g., serpent, dog-and-jackal, and senet from Egypt) challenge contemporary people to discern what the rules might have been, whereas games such as chess, go, and various others involving stone, bone, clay, or glass dice can be recognized by modern players in their earliest written, engraved, and stone forms from China, India, Mesoamerica, Africa, and the Near East. Children's model houses with miniature furniture and figures and model ships, wagons, chariots, and carts from sites across the ancient world indicate that toys are also of ancient origin.

People entertained one another on musical instruments, as many ancient literary and sacred texts attest, including ancient songs that survive in the form of the Psalms and the "Song of Miriam" in the Hebrew Bible, the Iliad and Odyssey, and hymns to Osiris and other ancient gods in addition to love songs and songs that express the challenges and triumphs of daily life. Singers, snake charmers, bear trainers, jesters, and acrobats—all the roles that later would be revived in vaudeville, traveling carnivals, and circuses—can be located among ancient peoples. String, wind, and percussion instruments, many trimmed with rare metals or precious stones, have been described in print and discovered in situ by archaeologists, allowing a better appreciation of the tonal systems and musical compositions that the ancients created as a source of creativity and for amusement. Ancient plays from the Greeks give voice to many modern concerns about life, meaning, and human affairs.

On an even wider scale one thinks of the grand public spectacles of ancient Babylon and ancient Rome, cities whose rulers spared no expense in putting on public entertainment for the masses, drawing on vast human, animal, and fiscal resources for events that could last for months and involve extensive human and animal carnage. Assurnasirpal II of Assyria, when inaugurating his palace at Calah, claims on a palace relief to have hosted a banquet for 47,074 people, who consumed, among other items, more than 1,000 cattle, 10,000 sheep, 15,000 lambs, 10,000 fish, 10,000 loaves of bread, and 100 containers of beer. Roman emperors staged banquets, games, and entertainments for the masses that sometimes bankrupted the state treasury.

Technological Presence

Pervasive in all these ancient forms of entertainment is the presence and necessity of technology. Natural materials have been reshaped to create implements and means by which human beings can amuse themselves, opening up vast areas for enjoyment beyond those afforded by nature. Technological innovations in chariot wheels and steering mechanisms, the raising and lowering of massive platforms through the use of advanced hydraulics, springs and hinges that could be opened and closed at a distance with precision and split-second timing, and many other inventions and improvements contributed to the crowd-pleasing spectacles of Greek and Roman theaters and the battles in the Colosseum in Rome between beast and beast, person and beast, and person and person.

Continuous innovation in designing and defining amusements of various kinds for particular classes of individuals and entire societies was accelerated with the advent of the printing press and then the Industrial Revolution as mass production of what had been luxury goods for the wealthy began to spread to other levels of society. Greater leisure time for a widening segment of the population created new opportunities for amusements to pass the time. Entertainment itself, however, always has manifested an ability to penetrate social barriers. Shakespeare's plays, for example, appealed not only to the masses but also to extremely wealthy and influential persons.

The modern era brought with it an array of new means of entertainment, including radio, television, video, computer games, virtual reality, film, e-mail, and chat rooms. However, even the older forms of entertainment underwent major changes as sports, for example, moved from the realm of mainly part-time amateur pursuits to a specialized, professional status (there were limited numbers of professional athletes in ancient times).

Within a generation, American football became a multi-billion-dollar television- and media-saturated semiglobal industry and football players became cultural heroes. Technological innovations transformed football from a game played by college students on dirt fields or cow pastures with no equipment to multi-million-dollar weekly gridiron contests in which each side employs advanced scouting technologies, sophisticated weight training and conditioning regimens, carefully managed nutrition programs, lightweight materials for protection, advanced telecommunications equipment to relay commands and insights, rapid-response medical treatments designed to keep players on the field as long as possible, complex ticketing systems, coordinated crowd control, prescheduled advertising breaks, and many other techniques and processes to induce fans to spend thousands of dollars to support their favorite teams.

Miniaturization and Combination

The latest miniaturization and communications technologies allow entertainment to be fully mobile. As they get increasingly smaller and more powerful in terms of resolution quality, camera phones have become the bane of many schools, fitness facilities, and other public venues where some people use them to take and transmit photographs of people in various stages of undress. Students have attempted to use them to film examination questions and send them to others, and similar problems arise with text messaging devices. At the same time users have employed them to film robberies, hit and run incidents, and other criminal acts that have led to court convictions that probably would not have been possible without the visual evidence they provide. Families and individuals have derived enjoyment from camera phone photographs they have taken of special moments and then downloaded into more permanent forms of storage for retrieval when desired. Cam-phone sites have joined the range of types of websites on the Internet, and it is estimated that 260 million camera phones were sold in 2004.

The pervasiveness of computers that are increasingly more powerful yet smaller with each new generation has spawned an enormous industry in designing sophisticated online games. A number of universities have established programs, and others are increasing the number of courses they offer in this area. The most advanced current form of these games are Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) that involve thousands of players in a constantly evolving scenario that is affected directly by the self-selected roles and self-assigned personas of the players.

Blogs (web logs) and vlogs (video blogs) are a recent technological innovation in which individuals create self-published websites that feature video clips, running texts of observations or other materials, photographs, and sound to communicate their thoughts or express themselves. Originally pioneered in the late 1990s by sites such as Pop.com and Digital Entertainment Network, they initially failed to catch on but are having a resurgence though sites such as Underground-film and Ourmedia. The more pervasive blogs, which often feature only text, are exerting a growing influence on mainstream media as bloggers democratize and decentralize journalism, news reporting, and information dissemination in entertaining forms.

Various forms of technology are being combined in new ways with the new media to create full-body experiences for people. In a way similar to the manner in which "surround sound" immersed a listener in a piece of music, people can experience a video in three dimensions while simultaneously feeling sensations on their skin and hearing things as if they were fully immersed in the environment they are seeing.

This ability to "experience the world" without really experiencing it raises important issues. Certainly there are training applications in which being able to experience an environment safely and learn how to react successfully within it could save lives in the future as pilots and others in high-risk situations can practice in a simulated world that looks, feels, smells, and tastes like the real thing. At the same time it is easy to imagine situations in which ethical issues should preclude exchanging the real thing for a simulated experience that mimics it exactly, for example, engaging in sexual experiences that one never could or would do in one's normal life.

Preliminary Assessment

The many forms of entertainment available today and the various means by which one can obtain and experience them can lead to a retreat from the world and oneself so pervasive that a person can focus only on the next thrill. Countries with a broad array of entertainment options suffer from what Gregg Easterbrook (2003) terms "the paradox of progress" because despite overwhelming numbers of possessions and experiences, real as well as vicarious, a sense of personal satisfaction and happiness elude people.

Some people have learned that certain forms of media can produce addictions as powerful as those caused by illicit drugs. This is the case in part because one never just uses technology; one also experiences it. This sensory, intellectual, and emotional interplay affects the user in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Reality shows on television have extended this impact more fully to the "actors" themselves as they create live, unscripted drama that others get to enjoy voyeuristically and register their pleasure or displeasure with a particular person on the show just as the emperor and the crowd determined the ultimate fate of ancient gladiators; the difference is that now the phone or mouse click rather than the thumb is the determining signal. Online chat rooms have led some people to alter the course of their lives; although some of the end results appear to be positive, they seem to be outweighed by media and professional counselors' stories of poor decisions and damaging consequences. Many people struggling with personal issues seek escape and relief in a fantasy world that makes them incapable of facing their problems.

Modern people's ancient ancestors would recognize most of the dilemmas that modern entertainment presents. They undoubtedly also would recognize that these ethical and moral challenges have multiplied over time and space.

DENNIS W. CHEEK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bender, Gretchen, and Timothy Druckrey, eds. (1994). Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. A set of essays on the meaning of technology that challenges notions of progress and determinism.

Bray, John. (2002). Innovation and the Communications Revolution: From the Victorian Pioneers to Broadband Internet. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers. A historical look at how global communications have developed and have affected the way people live.

Brende, Eric. (2004). Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. New York: HarperCollins. A technology guru reveals his thoughts about the pervasive and unhealthy influence of technology on life in the twenty-first century.

Easterbrook, Gregg. (2003). The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. New York: Random House. A hard look at one of the main dilemmas of modernity.

Hakken, David. (2003). The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. An anthropologist looks at the many aesthetic, ethical, and political questions posed by the uses and abuses of information technology.

McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. (2004). Technology as Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A thoughtful monograph that explores the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of people's interactions with technology.

Pesce, Mark. (2000). The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination. New York: Ballantine. A clever analysis of the way the use of distributed intelli-gence, engineered structures that interact with natural structures, and instantaneous access to information will transform culture and create a new Babel.

Peters, John Durham. (1999). Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An evocative history of communication in Western thought, showing how it shapes and has been shaped by people.

Postman, Neil. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin. A well-known critique of contemporary life and culture.

Schultze, Quentin J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House. A Christian critique of contemporary high-tech culture in the United States.

Squier, Susan Merrill, ed. (2003). Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. A pioneering analysis of radio as both a material and a cultural production.

Sterne, Jonathan. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. A look at the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio.

Stewart, David. (1999). The PBS Companion: A History of Public Television. New York: TV Books. A look at an American cultural icon that is frequently mentioned but infrequently watched.

Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics