Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In this paper, the author will try to answer these questions starting from the
question of what is entertainment. It will be clarified that in the long human history
people have tried to clearly separate logical aspect of our behaviors and emotional
aspect, in other words “Logos” and “Pathos.” Consequently we have succeeded in
hiding the great power of emotion only to our private aspect our life.
However, new media such as games and mobile phones have strongly affected this
relationship between logos and pathos and have partly destroyed it. What is
happening nowadays is that people show emotional aspect of their behaviors even in
formal situations. More distinctive fact is that this tendency is more obvious in
Western countries.
Finally based on these considerations it will be anticipated to which direction our
society is going forward. Also it will be discussed what we should do to keep that
basic identity as human being.
2 Positioning of Entertainment
2.1 What is Entertainment?
It is well known that there are more than several billon people facing starvation even
now all over the world. For these people it is crucial to obtain food to survive for
tomorrow or even today. In the global level conferences/meetings such as World
Economic Forum [1] how to cope with this problem has been one of the most serious
topics.
On the other hand in developed countries new types of entertainment have emerged
and are emerging such as chat on mobile phones, games on game machines and PCs,
etc. People tend to spend more and more time by enjoying these entertainments. There
have been big concerns and complaints against such a trend. The basic logic of such
complains is that compared with other human activities such as learning, trading,
industrial production and so on, entertainment is not productive. In other words it
would be complained that entertainment is only a waste of time.
But is this true? Then why there are already established huge entertainment
industries including movie industries, game industries, sports industries, and so on.
And why there are huge needs and markets for such entertainment. Probably we
should be careful when we discuss this topic.
2.2 Origin of Entertainment
What is happening now is not a totally new phenomenon. In the old era human life
was simple. Human carried out firming or hunting to survive. And when they are not
occupied with these works, they entertained themselves by various means. In other
words we could say that food is strongly related to the physical sustainability of
ourselves. At the same time we could point out that entertainment is related to the
mental/spiritual sustainability of ourselves.
Then the era of civilization came. Human introduced various types of activities
such as art creation, business activities, learning/teaching, religious activities, etc.
Because of these activities entertainment became considered as a secondary activity in
our life. Although entertainment retained a certain part of our everyday life, it has not
been considered as essential part of our life (Fig. 1).
