Category: Entertainment
Entertainment has provided us with distractions from the problems of the world, but are its various forms just helping to create them instead.
- Action movies – right-wing propaganda?
- Action movies can be exciting entertainment and a vicarious diversion from the difficulties we have in our lives. But what is the world view that they present?
- Co-workers and friends are not family
- We can have close relationships with co-workers and have friends, some of which we may have had since school, but they are not family. So where does this narrative come from?
- Comedy, or stand-up misanthropy?
- Life can be pretty tough at times, and humour can help to release the tension that builds up from the resulting stress. But do we have to denigrate and marginalise others to feed our humour?
- Critics
- We often rely upon movie and TV critics for advice upon how well movies and programs are likely to entertain us. It seems a cushy job, but maybe it isn't!
- Cultural programming
- We are bombarded with a lot of ideas about what we should focus our attention upon. Some are opportunistic, but many are part of a much broader agenda.
- Generative AI = Automated Indifference
- There is a lot of attention to generative AI encroaching on the territory of creative artists, but is it really a threat?
- News is entertainment
- The general idea of news is that it provides useful information about events around the world. However, that is not the source of its current appeal.
- Post-apocalypse is the new western
- Westerns were once a mainstay of movies and TV, but in recent years they seem to have been replaced by the post-apocalypse genre.
- Video streaming
- When Netflix was the only streaming site, it was a simple matter of selecting from a surfeit of options of what to spend the next couple of hours watching. No more!
- YouTube – a creative wasteland
- YouTube is very popular, but it seems to be filled with much dubious content.