Entertaiment is an activity that holds the attention of and gives pleasure or delight. It can be an idea or a task, but more often it is one of the activities that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience’s attention. The word “entertain” comes from the Latin inter tenere, meaning to hold inside. It is also rooted in the Indo-European root ten, meaning to stretch or extend.
According to Oliver and Barstsch (2010), entertainment can be defi ned as an activity that is understood objectively, involves communication between text and audience, provides an external stimulus, offers pleasure, requires an audience to exist, and occurs in a passive form. For more information, visit the Wikipedia article on Entertaiment.
This article was originally written for Transformational Entertainment News, and is reposted here by permission.