Amusements in the Age of Attention
Ben Thompson speaking at MoffettNathanson's annual Media, Internet & Communications Conference:
Consumers care about entertainment, they don't wanna be productive, they want to be entertained
This is correct now, and as everything becomes more automated and agentic, it's only going to intensify. But I keep wanting a more useful word than entertainment.
Peter G. Stromberg in Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You:
It seems to me the heart of the matter is that when one is engaged in entertainment, one's end is pleasurable amusement, and not some practical goal.
Amusement gets closer to the job: pleasurable, non-practical engagement.
The opposite of work but not just content to consume. Something to do, feel, shape, repeat, share or return to.
This is where games start to dissolve into a wider field of experience triggers inside a post-industrial playful media map: streaks, feeds, clips, quizzes, wagers, rituals, group chats, bits of social texture.
Or, as Brian Eno framed it in his 2015 BBC Music John Peel Lecture:
So I think there's a whole lot of things that we do which you might just call stylization. But what I want to persuade you is that they are actually part of this very broad definition of art as I'm using it. I made a list of things that I would put under that umbrella. Symphonies, perfume, sports cars, graffiti, needlepoint, monuments, tattoos, slang, Ming vases, doodles, poodles, apple strudels. Still life, Second Life, bed knobs and boob jobs.All of those things are sort of unnecessary in the sense that we could all survive without doing any of them, but in fact, we don't.
Unnecessary things for our amusement.
The question is why some unnecessary things hold us.
There isn't a consensus definition of engagement, but here's a simple one: engagement is the depth, quality, and intensity of attention. And here's the good news. While attention is finite and, as far as we know today, tapped out, engagement is unbounded.
Attention is finite. So the the interesting question is what turns attention into engagement.
Amusements in the Age of Attention.