bates ferri

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What's Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition 1 33.1 Fall 2010  S tephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri What’ s Enter tainment? Notes Toward a Definition Introduction Entertainment has been a part of all cultures, from the Chauvet Cave  paintings to the iPad. For Rothman, it is “the storehouse of national values” (xviii). Perhaps nowhere is that observation more apt than in the United States, a nation that Gabler terms a “republic of entertainment” (11). Many Americans seem to feel entitled to high-quality entertainment (Zillmann and V orderer viii), and more and more entertainment jostles for their attention (W olf 46). Zillmann goes so far as to predict that ente rtainment “will define , more than ever before, the civilizations to come” (“Coming of Media En- tertainment” 18). The importance of entertainment can be gauged by a study conducted by Brock and Livingston (259). They asked 1 15 American undergraduates how much money they would require in order to give up television for the rest of their lives. More than half said they would demand over a million dollars, with several na ming amounts exceeding a billion dol- lars. Despite the centrality of entertainment to society , however, academia has treated the subject in a disjointed, scattershot, sometimes condescend- ing fashion, for a variety of reasons. T o start with, the earliest communica- tion theorists chose to study the mass media in terms of persuasion rather than entertainment, and most subsequent scholarship has retained that em-

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