TELEVISION AND CULTURAL CHANGE

Television and Cultural Change

Television and Cultural Change

Introduction

In common sense one principal meaning of the verb to entertain is to provide the public with something enjoyable, or pleasurable that holds their attention for the period of time the entertaining object or occasion is perceived. In entertainment that truly entertains (recognizing that some would-be entertainment “flops”), attention is diverted from all other matters, hence occasional usage of one of its synonyms—diversion. In general, these commonsensical terms are employed with reference to what Lewis (1978:16-17) calls “moderately complex” (as opposed to “simple” or “highly complex”) objects and occasions (e.g., a comic strip, television sitcom, popular song, Broadway play). Etymologically the verb to entertain evolved from precursors in Latin and Old and Middle French (entertainer) meaning to hold.

SOCIOLOGY OF ENTERTAINMENT AS SUBDISCIPLINE

This section covers a representative selection of the literature comprising the sub discipline of the sociology of entertainment, organized according to the six facets. In all cases, the subject of the work reviewed must be primarily about entertainers or entertainment considered from a sociological point of view. This principle excludes wide-ranging works on, for example, the sociology of art, popular culture, or communication in which entertainment is but one of many cultural forms under scrutiny. For instance, research exists on strippers conducted and analyzed in both the feminist and the deviance traditions that, however, says little about such work as being entertaining. Similarly, certain legal questions bearing on entertainment are technical concerns that lie beyond the scope of sociology. Also excluded are works that use a form of entertainment as a springboard for examining something outside of or broader than the field of entertainment.

Note that, with the handful of exceptions noted below, the sociology of entertainment lacks its own theory; that is, no one has proposed a set of abstract principles defining the field, nor has one emerged inductively from research done in it. In harmony with this observation is the fact that very little theoretical or empirical work has been published on entertainers or entertainment per se. Indeed, until now, neither of these two central terms had been defined scientifically, defined beyond their commonsense conceptions discussed above. Weinstein's (1991) observations on the academic discourse on popular music describes equally well that on the sociology of entertainment.

THE NATURE OF ENTERTAINMENT

In addition to what has just been said about the nature of entertainment, it should be noted that, for its consumers when they are truly entertained, they are immersed in a leisure experience. In this instance, the experience is primarily pleasurable, one of enjoyment and little else. Such leisure is casual. Casual leisure is immediately intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it (Stebbins 1997, 2001b). It is fundamentally hedonic, engaged in for the significant level of pure enjoyment, or pleasure, found there. It is also the classificatory home of much of deviant leisure (Rojek 2000; Stebbins 1996a). Of the eight types of casual leisure now identified (listed in Stebbins 2004b), the one ...