Entertainment…
 

Excluding humor, what good comes of it and why is western culture so enthralled by it? Where has it delivered us and where is it pushing us?

If not for entertainment all there would be is work. If you work, work, work eventually you will give up on life itself. The key is to find a happy medium between the two.

Entertainment is too vague a term . . . does it only include things that make us smile? Or perhaps 'serious' art too?

in some way entertainment helps push forward technology, Like computer games which IMO is why computer tech has been pushed forward so fast

Porn is the hand-maiden to technological progress . . . . . . . . .

heh yeah i was going to sya that thats what got the internet to be so popular

i think you need to define entertainment more, im entertained by my wallpaper, which is completly separte from western culture

As entertainment i mean the institutions of television, magazines and popular music etc.

it takes up the time we have nothing else to do with

entertainment is the method used to control the population by subversion - made possible by our own endless and unquestioning self-indulgence.

technological gluttony?

Entertainment is a double-edged sword. It is both the "bread and circuses" method of controlling public opinion, and also a necessary stress release from the drudgery of modern workaholic life. Your entertainment is basically leisure time at whatever activity you choose to participate in. I, for one, consider most entertainment media nowadays to be a tad too much of the numbness persuasion.

Is tribal dancing as much entertainment as reading a Harry Potter book? Do you make a distinction between active (physical such as dance or sport, mental such as game playing) and passive (television, to some extent internet) entertainment?

I think the crux of most entertainment is that it transports people beyond their immediate situation. I wonder if anybody has an antropological/social evolutionary perspective on this - what was the role of entertainment for our earliest ancestors, vs. the role it has assumed now? I agree with ARTelevision that (to paraphrase - hope I get the essence of your statement right) entertainment keeps "the masses" from rebelling by giving them an outlet for (or perhaps masking) the dissatisfaction with their lives necessarily created by living in a repressive and power-unbalanced hegemony. If Marx had ever seen a television he would have thought that it, not religion, was the opiate of the masses.

I think entertainment can either be liberating and transcendent, or it can be repressive and controlling, depending on the type of entertainment and the disposition of the persons engaging in it.