It's lunch time and I'm with a large group of my friends, about 8 or 10. There's a few side conversations going on about food, sports, and plans for the weekend. No single person was determining the flow of the conversations. Then something happened. Almost instantly, the collective flow of conversations turned to Leonardo DiCaprio and whether or not he was a good actor based on the amount of films he was in.
At the time, I did not think anything strange about it because this is how a lot of our conversations went. The troubling part was the fact that everyone in our group has done this at least once. Unlike the brain dead megaphone man who appears during the course of the party, the man in our group was already there.
This led me to the conclusion that the infotainment culture is even stronger in the younger generation. I normally do not see adults at family parties talking about actresses or mainstream music, so why is our generation so inclined to bring up entertainment?
I believe that part of the cause is just our age. We have not experienced as much as someone 10 or 20 years older and from my experience, adults spend a great deal of time talking about the world around us or their life stories.
However, the main force driving the shift in our conversations is the inclination of my generation towards the mediums of entertainment. Television, computers, cellphones and even magazines are ingrained into our generation because of their allure. This leads to one ethical question that can not be answered by facts and conjecture alone. Is the inclination towards entertainment a learned behavior or are we born to crave and cause distractions?
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I think our inclination towards entertainment is a learned behavior. We are born without knowing much about the aspects of life all are behaviors and what we consider entertaining or not are learned from our environment. Most children are exposed to entertainment at a very young age. There parents put them in front of a television, a computer, or another entertaining device to distract them. From that point on children learn that the meaning of entertainment are televisions, computers, and other distracting items. After experiencing this type of entertainment it is difficult not to get distracted and carried away by it.
ReplyDeleteOh, talking about Lebron James' "The Decision" and how much I love the Beatles was a bad idea at that party? Whoops.
ReplyDeleteWe're kids. What we experience is what we talk about. Since the TV, radio, Internet, and iPods all encroach on our way of thinking, we spit it back out when we talk. After a few years, we are bound to talk about something more complex than entertainment. Though talking about partisan politics at a party is going to get me plenty of enemies.
Oh, by the way: Leonardo DiCaprio, great actor.