A War on Boredom: Entertainment in America - Essay Example

? There are a host of serious problems facing our society in America and the world more generally today. People in Africa are starving. We are losingthe war for hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan, breeding a whole new generation of extremists who will hate America, everything we stand for, and do everything we they can to kill us and end our way of life. We are dying of everything from obesity and heart disease to cancer. We are losing the war on drugs, the war on crime and the war on poverty. We seem to be losing battles on every front, in the real world, in any imagined world. The world seems to be falling apart. But there is one battle we are winning, and I am here to congratulate you, America, in fighting and winning the single most important war, the one without which our whole way of life would mean absolutely nothing. America, we are winning the war on boredom. We have successfully structured our society in such a way that we are literally bombarded with entertainment from every front, ensuring that we do not have to spend not even a single minute on silent contemplation, but rather can turn on, tune out and just go along with the tide of entertainment we have structure as a beautiful cocoon around our precious minds. This war on boredom was not always going as well as it is now. The history of entertainment has many long, dark periods. Believe it or not, there was a time in our nation’s history when there was no form of broadcast entertainment – none at all. But it does not do well to dwell on such dark times; to do so would darken our precious collective soul. So I will begin our history of our glorious battle on boredom with the invention of the first form of broadcast entertainment: the radio. This was a magical device when it was first invented more than a century ago, and through its amazing prowess beams of entertainment could come straight into our houses for the first time. These entertainment beams could carry an amazing variety of entertainment formats into our living room. From soap operas (which got their names from this early format) to news and music, suddenly people did not have to leave their home to receive entertainment. Despite, this, however, there were a lot of problems with this earliest battle on boredom. For one thing, it was only entertainment through one sense: the ears. This means that it could only titillate in a limited number of ways. Sports broadcasts, sexual imagery and so only have very limited capacity when you can only hear them, so this was less than the perfect format of entertainment. Furthermore, this entertainment device was usually only one per household, and this meant that to receive the entertainment one would often have to congregate with the rest of your family or friends to listen, forcing social interaction which is against all that the war on boredom stands for. And if you want to get a form of entertainment that involved the eyes and the ears, you would have to leave your home, another thing that is simply unacceptable All this would eventually change with radios becoming more ubiquitous and other forms of entertainment surpassing the early radios, such as television, computers and the internet. Now that a brief history of the war on boredom has been undertaken, it is important to outline the ways in which we have been so successful, the causes for success so that we can continue to fight our war on boredom, and more importantly, to continue winning the war that we have fought so hard for. One of the major causes for the incredible amount of success that we have had on this front is the amazing amount of resources we have been willing to contribute to this cause. A great example of this is the film industry: each year, we spend billions upon billions of dollars paying actors whose only value is the ability to keep us from feeling bored. Each year we also invest hundreds of millions of dollars on new technologies to make this initial investment into actors abilities pay off better and better. Each year the movies we watch have more explosions, bigger explosions and other pyrotechnics than the year before. On top of this, advances in computer technology mean that computer graphics can get better year by year – in a few short decades we have moved from the certainly amazing graphics and styles of Jurassic Park and Titanic, to the even more ridiculously composed films like Dark Knight and Avatar. And all of these improvements are due to us having our priorities right: investing millions upon millions of dollars on entertainment rather than on silly wastes of money like cancer research or feeding the poor and hungry around the world. Film is not the only place we have shown that we have our priorities straight. There are many other areas where we show a devotion to our own entertainment that must be lauded. The major other one that comes to mind is sports. We pay athletes millions upon millions of dollars each year for having skills and talents that are extremely valuable to society. In the NBA, we pay people for being extraordinarily tall, and for the amazing ability to drop a ball through a hoop for our entertainment. In the NFL we pay people even more for the right of watching them run up and down fields catching and throwing balls to each other. We even pay millions for people to play a sport called ‘hockey’ which consists mostly of burly Canadians punching each other whilst trying to put some black rubber into a mesh of some sort, all while going around a ice surface on ice skates. The last example especially shows that we have our priorities straight when deciding whom to reward monetarily in our society. Teachers, social workers and so on certainly do good things for our society, but we have made the right choice again and again in choosing to prioritize our war on boredom over these other, less important social programs. Sure, the salary of any NFL team could fully fund a large hospital with money to spare, but obviously we have made the right decision in choosing to put our money to use in the way we are now. One last way we have succeeded in prioritizing entertainment above everything else, a practice we should continue, is the way we glorify the practioners of entertainment. I will, and I believe anyone else would say the exact same thing, emulate basically anything I see on an entertainment device. If a star like chocolate, then I like chocolate too! And if a professional football player tells me that they where a particular kind of football cleats to make them good at football, I will copy this without thinking. If an actor I love tells me to wash with head and shoulders, who am I to say no to that? They are clearly right, because they are famous, and in our society we have rightly recognized that fame and goodness are the exact same thing. We have professional athletes tell kids to stay off drugs, and rock stars to tell youth to vote, because our society knows that it is right, it is entirely seemly to simply follow what a famous person says without thought. Our utter devotion to anyone who can manage to get themselves on TV, on film or on the internet even shows again that our society has chosen its proper priorities, and puts not just our money where our mouth is, but also our time, energy, love and devotion. Respecting the famous is a central part of our war on boredom. Finally, just in case all of these methods of passive entertainment that we have made sure our available to us, sitting and watching things in our homes, turns out not to be enough, we have in the past fifty or so years put a great deal of money and resources into one final form of entertainment: video games. Video game consoles that costs hundreds of dollars have sold millions of themselves in recent years. Every few years, the genius companies that have found ways to improve the consoles they make, allowing us to spend even more money on the even new, fancier consoles with better bells and whistles that provide even better graphics and an even more realistic way to not experience reality. The amazing thing about these videogames is that they have a range of ability to show things and let you experience things that you never could in real life. Because they are entirely computer generated, they can have violence, sexuality and other excellent aspects of entertainment on a scale that is just impossible on other formats. Furthermore, with the invention of new online gaming, people can play against each other and “troll” each other even when they do not live anywhere near each other, making social interaction in the way it had happened for the many thousands of years of human development. Shrugging off these terrible and out dated ways of interactional patterns and moving into new ones that are entirely digital can be nothing but good for society, and it is our monetary devotion, our willingness to spend inordinate amounts of money for each new instalment of each new videogame and console that has made this happen. Again, like in the case of sports, our society is making a good and laudable choice in spending literal mountains of money on our entertainment in the form of videogames rather than wasting it on lost causes such as ending hunger. Now that we have demonstrated the techniques that have allowed us to win the war on boredom, to fight bravely to defend and expand the role of entertainment on society, it is of fundamental importance to take a moment to reflect on the benefits this provides to our society, to our selves, to show why we must continue on this path of valuing entertainment over all. One of the most important ones is elimination cumbersome and terrible social interaction. Back in the olden days, to alleviate boredom people would have to go to extreme lengths, going out, seeing friends, communicating with friends and family. This led to all kinds of problems – people would get into arguments over issues they were discussing because of these cumbersome discussions, form political ideas and so on. Plus, people only talk to each other to further their own goals anyways, so avoiding this terrible fate is an amazing time saver for everyone. Plus, it has been statistically proven that the vast majority of people are morally reprehensible, the scum of the earth, very, very bad people. Thus avoiding people generally is probably good for our moral character and the ability of people to simply not be forced to seek out these interactions in order to avoid boredom can be nothing but beneficial to their moral edification. Probably the single best thing about our constant war on boredom, and our devotion to entertainment, is the fact that it spares us from those terrifying moments of silence where real thoughts can come through and disturb our moments of mindless white noise. When we fail to get entertained for a moment, things intrude on our thoughts that are truly terrifying – thoughts such as “what am I doing with my life?” or the recognition of the futility of most of the things we do day by day. Even worse, sometimes we start thinking about the problems that we have paid so much money for entertainment to never have to think about. Sometimes in those dark moments, we will conceptualize how many people at that moment are dying of hunger, of AIDS, of malaria, of war, of cancer. We think about the people in our own country who go hungry and cannot afford housing, food or clothes. This is so ridiculous; because we spend so much money avoid thinking about this! Luckily, when these dark thoughts burst their way into our conceptions, we do not have to cave to them, we can reject them! We have entertainment in all forms beamed into our houses constantly. We can avoid these problems, reject them, ignore them completely, and never have to deal with it. The mental white noise prevents these dark thoughts, and the desire to do something about them, from being part of our lives. Who knows, maybe many of the terrible ideas of our history, such as Nazism or slavery would not have happened if they had our entertainment level. We need our entertainment to keep us mentally safe and clean. There are lots of problems in our society, but our devotion to entertainment is not one of them. We have won the war on boredom, and need to keep on doing everything that we have been: paying our actors millions, paying our athletes millions, paying our videogame makers millions, and investing in new entertainment technologies constantly. If we fail to live up to the standards our forefathers have laid down for us then the consequences could be dire; we would be faced into constant social interaction with the terrible people in our lives, and would be subject to terrible dark moments where real thoughts intrude. Read More