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Entertainment

Related: content - culture industry - mass media - mass society - media - pleasure - show business - spectacle

Mass media: movies/film/cinema - mass media - television - radio - newspaper - new media

A poster of the Vaudeville team, Joseph Hart and Carrie DeMar from 1899
image sourced here.

Definition

Entertainment is an amusement or emotional diversion intended to hold the attention of the audience or participants.

Some forms of entertainment:

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment [Jul 2004]

The history of entertainment violence

Bok's well-crafted comparison of the Roman experience with entertainment violence to our own rests on the differences between live versus mediated entertainment. Bok finds much in common in the social impact of violent entertainment as practiced live in ancient Rome and electronically in modern America. Violent images appear to serve similar functions in both societies. Describing the Roman exposure, she states: "Violent spectacles kept the citizenry distracted, engaged, and entertained and, along with re-enactments and celebrations of conquests and sacrifices abroad, provided the continued acculturation to violence needed by a warrior state." --Ray Surette reviewing MAYHEM Violence as Public Entertainment, Sissela Bok

Sex, drugs and music hall

By Matthew Sweet

Circus lion tamer, lithograph by Gibson & Co., 1873. Edited digital image from the Library of Congress, reproduction number: LC-USZC4-2994.
image sourced here.
image related to subject via Victorian entertainment

Sex, drugs and hedonism, a summer weekend for today's twenty-somethings or the average Victorian weekend? Matthew Sweet investigates.

You've seen it in a hundred costume dramas. A group of Victorians sitting around the piano. Men in dinner suits, women twitching fans, the daughter of the household bashing out a Mendelsohn standard, polite applause muffled by white kid gloves, and another round of constipated dialogue.

'...it's hard to think of a public pleasure with which they did not engage with intense, breathless enthusiasm.'

If only somebody had thought to check the entertainment listings on the front page of The Times. Instead of suffering this well-mannered torture, they could have telegraphed the Cremorne Gardens and booked a table near the bandstand, scored a few strikes at the American bowling alley, taken in one of the shows or concerts, guzzled down a curry, danced until four in the morning, smoked a few opium-laced cigarettes, then returned home on the tube to negotiate their inevitable hangovers. --http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/society/pleasure_01.shtml [May 2005]

see also: Victorian era - entertainment - music halls

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