New word alert: Emotainment
Doctor, doctor… it hurts when I do this…
I hate making up new words. And yet I keep doing it. Why? Because I love making up new words. Love and hate are not so far apart. We learned this from Mr. Spock on Star Trek. The opposite of love is not hate… the opposite of love is Andy Dick. Anyway…
So. If you don’t think that "edutainment" or "infotainment" are NOT real words… and the very idea of regular people like me inventing new words makes you itch, then stop reading right now and go play Flow.
But if we use "edutainment" to mean content that is both educational and entertaining, and "infotainment" to mean those things that are entertaining and informational, well… we have a new form of entertainment online that revolves around all the new social thingies that we’ve got going on. Do any of these sound like things you’re doing these days?
- Heavy commenting on blogs — not just leaving one comment, but engaging in comment strings, learning who the regulars are, developing a personality on the blog for yourself
- IMing with a cadre of friends whom you only know online (another word of mine, "eLationships" applies here)
- Creating avatars and personnae in virtual communities in order to vent various feelings and thoughts you wouldn’t under normal circumstances
- Engaging in online gameplay not because of the game, but because of the relationship potentials
- Posting and replying on bulletin boards until all hours of the night because of the back-and-forth with various members
- Chatting in chat rooms, being clever, being sweet, being sympathetic, zinging each other, being flirty, being outright sexy
Well, if the appeal of any of those activities stems largely from the interpersonal drama, the friendships, the wit, the arguments, the zingers — all the communications that aren’t specifically related to the material itself, but to the feelings of the participants, you’re involved in what I’m now calling emotainment.
Isn’t emotion entertaining? I don’t think we’ve thought of it that way before, but I believe it now is. In the same way that we didn’t use to think of education or information as ever being entertaining… but now we do; hence edutainment and infotainment.
When we engage in social interactions on the Web, we are doing so in a medium that we observe even as we interact with it. We are the audience of our own performance. And so,
- As I type in my own zinger on Digg and dugg somebody, I get to mutter to myself, "Nice one, Andy!" I have been emotained.
- A group of friends gathers in IM or a chat room and one gets out of hand, bringing a bit too much drama, another soothes the gang, chilling everyone down… impressing the bunch with her words of wisdom. Emotaining them all.
- A guild leader in World of Warcraft dresses down one of his minions in front of a crowd of guild members after a series of infarctions. The offender leaves in a huff, but all the others agree, "That droog had it coming, and totally had to go." A nice bit of emotainment.
It has been remarked on often before that we engage in higher levels of emotional outburst on the Web, in IM and in email than we do in real life. We don’t self censor, it is said, because we don’t have the social cues of real life. And we don’t have the other person in front of us. I also think we tend to jump on the drama llama online because, well… it’s fun. It’s emotaining. It’s fun to get a little frisson of excitement from being a bit more brusque, risque, flirty, sweet or angry than we do in real life.
And since the consequences aren’t (usually) so severe, we go ahead and push the envelope. Which is what entertainment is about. It’s just, in these cases, rather than the moments being crafted by a screenwriter or author, we make them ourselves with our own emotions.
Emotainment. Now playing at an adrenal gland near (er… “in”) you.
6 Comments so far
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I thought “edutainment” and “infotainment” refered to entertainment which was also educational or informative. Therefore, “emotainment” means entertainment which is… emotion-inducing?
Which isn’t even vaguely far-fetched. The rest of your stuff isn’t off point, but just sayin’.
Michael — All entertainment should be emotion-inducing to a certain extent. I cried when I saw “Color Purple.” Yes, I’m a sucker. That’s an induction of emotion. I laugh at the Comedy Central Roasts. The induction of emotion is at the heart of many entertainment.
But to be entertained specifically by one’s *own* behavior that is emotional — ie, funny or dramatic conversations, group disagreements and catharsis, sensual or sexual dialogue, etc. — rather than the presentation of packaged content that has an emotional load… that’s what I’m referring to as “emotainment.”
So, to be clearer… You read a news item and find it interesting and entertaining = infotainment. An editorial on the subject makes you angry = well, just entertainment or more infotainment. But if you can get on a blog or chat room or IM session and spend 2 hours that night going back and forth with other people — either commiserating or arguing about that editorial subject — you’ve had 2 hours of emotainment. You’ve been, to a degree, entertained by your own ability to generate a dramatic, emotional state, rather than just absorbing or observing one from a content creator.
Maybe I should call it “autoemotainment?” ; )
I have been known to start commenting on sites (say, like this one) but I think because if you sit and look at your site daily and see absolutely NO visitors, it is probably because you never actually go out and suggest that you exist. I have only just started making the connection between Blogs/Comments and the old TRS-80 days of BBS’s where we would send a message (yes, way before email) and then call back every 10 minutes to see if anyone had left a reply. In that case, I would say that you are right and I am “emotained” whenever I receive a comment or, like you said, leave a classic remark (not unlike this one, although it isn’t all that classic I suppose).
I would doubt that most people who do that would consider themselves entertained afterwards. It would take a large degree of self-awareness to look at what you’ve been doing and be entertained by it; being entertained during the act itself is downright unlikely. (Though entirely possible.)
Unrelated (maybe) to this is a blog post I thought you’d be interested in, Andy:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?414
Michael: Good article… Reminds me of the line from “Gladiator:” — “Are you not entertained!!?? Are you not entertained!!!” Also reminds me of McLuhan. I wish he could have seen all this. I’m not sure it matters if most people *consider themselves* entertained. Lots of people who spend time in bars chatting don’t ever put down “conversation” as a chief form of entertainment. Nor do people who attend church often describe it as a social activity. It’s called “worship” to them (er… us). But if it quacks in an entertaining way…
Actually, I found myself agreeing with Micheal’s initial points, too. I love the concept, Andy. It makes sense in my head. But the way you’re correlating infotainment and edutainment just doesn’t quite jive for me.
Really, I’ve tended to interpret the words “infotainment” and “edutainment” not just as words which describe forms of entertainment which are also informational or educational, but as describing forms of particularly corny, overly sincere information or educational bits which are trying to pass themselves off as entertaining — and usually wind up failing in the process. I’ve also tended to understand the phrase as having been fairly recently coined because it followed on the heels of a spate of afterschool (and inschool) specials that were especially rampant in the 80s. So when you say “infotainment” I hear a snarky little word which implies that while both inforamation and entertainment are (theoretically) present, they usually cancel each other out. I may tend to mentally blend a little bit of “infomercial” in there, too, though. I may tend to focus too much on the idea that infotainment inherantly misses the interests of its core audience (sometimes by battering its audience over the head with its message… sometimes by completely misjudging its emotional mark, eh?).
I love the idea that these certain sets of activities we engage in over the internet resonate most because they allow us the ability to exercise our emotions. That makes sense and it also allows for a there there that might not have been fully there before. Yet adding “-tainment” to the wordlet “emo” seems to imply that the emotions in play are not real, and the entertainment value in question is more than lowbrow and instantly forgettable.