A War on Boredom: Entertainment in America - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... 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 ...Download file to see next pagesRead More