Importance of Entertainment to the society

We live in an entertainment culture. The most obvious indication of that is that much of what people care about is entertainment: Lady Gaga, Big Brothers all over the world, American Idol, etc. An obvious question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and usually I'm reluctant to try and answer that question. Sure, it's easy to make fun of fans and celebrities and people riveted to their televisions watching obese people exercising and getting weighed, but who says people have to engage in serious activities all the time? If we look at what most people have been doing most of the time throughout human history, it's probably not discussing moral philosophy and inventing calculus. And part of the reason for that is that people need rest and recovery time and enjoyable activities: without some sort of stress relief we would self-destruct. Yet there are some serious questions we should ask about people's engagement with entertainment. One of them concerns those who seem to get so deeply immersed in entertainment that they begin to neglect the possibilities and responsibilities of the rest of their lives. Whether or not we want to use the word "addiction" to cover this sort of possibility, the results of an overuse of entertainment can be much the same as an overuse of a drug: A person can become so obsessed with a form of entertainment (such as an online game) that it begins to destroy his or her life.And that leads us back to the question of whether an entertainment culture is a good thing or a bad thing.

 Recently Anthropologist Jeff Snodgrass and his colleagues have published research  that is intended to answer this question in one specific context, that of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). As anyone who has played these games knows, they can be extremely absorbing. Players often report that they lose track of time, even of their everyday surroundings and identities and feel like they become the characters they portray in the game. such experiences occur in many different forms of entertainment, from reading a romance novel to watching an exciting movie.Snodgrass leads a team of researchers who are themselves long-term WoW players. They have interviewed many other players and have posted online surveys that have been completed by hundreds of WoW enthusiasts. The research team has discovered a complex web of relationships that help us to get a handle on the "good or bad" question. But if we simplify it all down to a bottom line, the answer is that becoming deeply immersed in WoW can be both and good thing and a bad thing. WoW-along with many other forms of entertainment-can be an effective form of stress relief, for it allows the player to so completely forget real world problems and thus relax for awhile. But precisely because the experience can be so relaxing and pleasurable, some players-by their own admission-overuse it. One of the valuable results of this research is that maybe it can help us put an end to the debate over whether entertainment is good or bad, and get down to the more interesting question of exactly what factors produce positive and negative mental health outcomes for entertainment users.


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