Caught in Play
How Entertainment Works on You
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about.
To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption.
For more information, please visit www.caughtinplay.com.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author and anthropology professor Stromberg (Language and Self-Transformation) examines popular entertainment of all kinds for their societal effects, past and present, in this rigorous and readable study. Books, movies, and shopping come under the microscope, but so do forms like advertising; intelligently twining propagandistic effects with the idea of romantic realism to find the motivation for consumer spending and product appeal. Stromberg also delivers an array of information about early theater and the origins of the European and American obsession with fashion. Drawing from a collection of established researchers and authors, Stromberg's all-encompassing text is, itself, a meta-narrative on his idea of being "caught up," that entertainment maintains its grip on society because it replaces mundane, every day existence with a more colorful, peaceful, meaningful world. Reading this smart commentary on the grand spectrum of entertainment is an addictive experience, a sharp example of the very phenomenon it illuminates.
