2. Study of media entertainment
• Only in the last 15 years or so has
entertainment as a media experience received
much academic attention
– Zillmann’s work in the 1990s and 2000s is the
main source of knowledge
3. What is entertainment?
• The general idea is that entertainment relates
to intrinsic satisfaction of media exposure
– Enjoyment of some sort
• May be affective (liking)
• May be cognitive (gain pleasure from learning,
fantasizing, etc.)
4. Enjoyment
• The main idea here is that some form of
positive feeling is generated by exposure to
media content
– Even in the case of negative content, release from
the negative feelings through a happy ending is
considered a source of enjoyment
5. What is enjoyable?
• “Transportation into narrative worlds”
• (Green, Brock & Kaufman)
– Loss of attention to the here and now concurrent
with an increase in the feeling that one is in
another place and time
– Transportation is a desired state
• Disappointment when audience member just “couldn’t
get into it”
• Anger when someone is talking during the movie
6. Transportation
• People are drawn to scary worlds and
situations and not just happy ones
– “Stories enable recipients to identify and mingle
with risk takers—to live life even more fully. Just
as more story heroes survive risks, the story
recipient can see herself as similarly invulnerable.
Even if the story protagonists are doomed, the
audience member is safe.”
• Sensation seeking?
7. • Transportation may have advantages as it
allows the audience member to think about
past selves or to construct possible futures.
• It also may reflect the need to understand
others
8. • Transportation allows people to leave their
real-world worries behind
– Especially valuable to those who focus on their
own shortcomings or discrepancies from an ideal
self
• Study showed that those who had just received
feedback saying they had failed watched more
television
9. • Transportation allows people to expand their
horizons
– Creates an openness to new information
• Identity play
– Vicarious experience without associated risk
• Learning
10. • Enjoyment through connections with characters
– “Transportation into a narrative world may be a
prerequisite for identification with fictional
characters. Central to the process of identification is
the adoption of a character’s thoughts, goals
emotions, and behaviors, and such vicarious
experience requires the reader or viewer to leave his
or her physical, social, and psychological reality
behind in favor of the world of the narrative and its
inhabitants.”
• Parasocial interaction (‘illusion of intimacy’)
• Disposition theory (just world)
• Mood management (discussed before)
11. Influences on enjoyment
• Craftsmanship
– Detail
• Situational influences
– Distraction
– Experimentally instructing viewers to focus on surface
detail of a narrative
– Fact v. fiction
• Ambiguous findings—may be that narrative plausibility is the
most important
– Interactivity
• May enhance “flow”
12. Emotional stimulation
• Emotion management
– “Emotional stimulation or relaxation can be
actively regulated by varying the strength and
target of dispositional alignments based on the
distance between characters and the self
(Zillmann, 1994). In this perspective, pleasure and
pain, as well as arousal and relaxation, are neither
mutually exclusive nor polar opposites. Instead,
enjoyment is seen as relief from overstimulation
(through relaxation) or understimulation (through
arousal).
13. Flow
• Csikszentmihalyi’s study of artists and the
intense pleasure of their immersion in their
tasks led to the concept of “flow” and its
application in media contexts.
14. Flow
• Flow is a self-motivating experience characterized
by:
• Intense and focused concentration on what one is
doing in the present moment,
• Merging of action and awareness,
• Loss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss of
awareness of oneself as a social actor),
• A sense that one can control one’s actions; that is
a sense that one can, in principle, deal with the
situation because one knows how to respond to
whatever happens next,
15. • Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a
sense that time has passed faster than
normal), and
• Experience of the activity as intrinsically
rewarding, such that often the end goal is just
an excuse for the process.
– (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 90 quoted
in Sherry, 2004)
