Defining Entertainment
Entertainment vs Enjoyment - what do these words even mean?
“Visiting a zoo or aquarium isn’t / shouldn’t be entertaining … but in order to drive guest engagement and repeat visits, it must be enjoyable.”
Welcome to Part 2 of digging into my (currently) favorite false dichotomy!
In my last post, I talked a little bit about why I think trying to attach morality to entertainment and enjoyment of captive animals is not only nonfunctional, but actively confusing to the public. In this one, I’m looking at what people think the definitions of those wibbly-wobbly words and concepts are: productive discussion only occurs when people are talking about the same thing.
A while back I asked people on two of my different personal social media feeds to help me answer a semantics question: “What’s the difference to you between something (an experience, a piece of media, an activity) being enjoyable and something being entertaining?” One feed was a private profile, where people were likely to have a sense of why I was asking; the other was a public twitter account where I’ve accumulated a small but decently varied audience of people I don’t have personal relationships with. I figured that using both audiences would provide a reasonable sample size and prevent personal relationships with the respondents from skewing the answers.
In addition, I specifically left out the context of the question. I’ve found over time that animals are such a charged topic that as soon as a question is framed in relation to them, people can’t keep the morality and emotional perspective from creeping in. So the question was left vague, simply as a conceptual thing, and people responded with very thoughtful answers.
Here’s what they said (stars indicate frequently stated concepts):
An entertaining experience:
You’re a passive actor / no active engagement ***
Mindless
Short-lived, fun once**
Easily forgotten***
“Fun”, not taken seriously **
Not “inherently good” (e.g. awful TV can be entertaining)
Designed to divert your attention / capture your attention for a while ******
A way to pass the time
Derived from an external source*
A distraction
Not necessarily enjoyable (e.g. schadenfreude, hate-watching something, horror movies, scrolling Facebook, watching a train crash) *****
An engineered / encapsulated experience*
Often contains elements of humor*
Expectation to “get something out of” the experience
Enjoyable:
Involves active participation**
Find pleasure / positive experience in engagement ********
Would purposefully choose to do repeatedly***
Pleasurable or feels good but not necessarily “fun” / “interesting” ****
“Ethically good”
Higher quality experience
Memory lasts and continues to be pleasurable*
Enhances sense of “life being good”
Derived from an internal state***
A reaction to an experience
While at first the responses seemed to be all over the place, when I started actually categorizing them into the lists above, some pretty strong trends were apparent. Overall, the majority of people who answered my questions felt that an “entertaining experience” is one that was curated specifically to grab and hold their attention temporarily, was maybe fun at the time but lacked depth, often left them a passive actor, and wasn’t necessarily something that left them feeling good or happy at the end. In contrast, the same people described an “enjoyable experience” as being something inherently pleasurable that they were actively engaged in, that was more likely to come from an intrinsic source than an external one, something they’d remember fondly and actively choose to repeat, as well as being something that contributed to their quality of life or feeling of happiness for longer than the duration of experience itself.
Some folk offered really good commentary on the patterns they observed emerging from the responses. One person mentioned that what is entertaining or enjoyable does not seem to be defined by the experience itself - that it may more accurately be defined by what the person experiencing it gets out of it. That tracks with the gestalt of the answers provided. People’s categorization of an experience depended much more on its impact on them in both the short- and long-term than it did on what the experience actually was.
It was also suggested that the categorization of an experience depends on the relationships involved in making it happen. Entertainment, one respondent said, is dependent on the relationship between the experience/media and the consumer, as it’s created intentionally to gain their attention or evoke a response from them. Enjoyable things in contrast are much more internally focused, as they’re not dependent on a purposefully curated setting.
Not everyone’s commentary fit so neatly into those buckets, of course. For some people, the active / passive engagement paradigm was flipped: an enjoyable thing weren’t inherently engaging, like going for a walk in nature, but entertainment - like listening to a funny podcast while doing so - required active engagement to derive a benefit. Others provided thoughts on why one might seek out either type of experience. To some, enjoyment fulfills aesthetic desires and needs, where as entertainment is surprising and delighting, providing benefits that are unexpected. Another said that for them, entertainment is measured by how much something appeals to their mind and makes them pay attention; enjoyment for them is a measurement of the sensory experience and how they feel after it’s over.
Multiple people mentioned an overlap between the two concepts: pointing out that things can be both entertaining and enjoyable simultaneously. Most examples I can come up with aligned with the general consensus about both types of experiences: a good TV show (curated, passive engagement, short-lived but memorable, but makes you feel good); a well designed haunted-house (curated, active / passive engagement combination, but not so stressful you don’t leave feeling good); an silly, joke-filled evening with friends (not curated, active engagement, but with a heavy focus on humor and positive fun); watching baby animals (not curated, passive engagement, humorous, pure and good).
Someone suggested that this might be a squares and rectangles type of situation: all entertaining things are enjoyable, but not all enjoyable thing are entertaining. A decent percentage of the other respondents disagreed, and everyone who did volunteered examples of entertaining things that they did not inherently find pleasurable - such as watching a sad movie or reading the comments section.
Philosophy aside, where does this leave us regarding applying these concepts to animal use? My biggest takeaway what makes an experience entertaining versus enjoyable is entirely subjective. There’s a general sense of the shape of each concept that a lot of people seem to agree with - one respondent characterized it as entertainment being “more superficial” and enjoyment being “more personal” - but even within that, the details of what matters and why varies pretty widely.
When you get into the different framings people use to talk about the concepts, the possibility for cross-talk is high. Imagine you’re eavesdropping on a conversation and you hear this sentence: “Wow, I was really entertained during our visit to the zoo last week.” From just the sentiments expressed in my small sample, that could just as easily mean “I thought it was funny to watch the bear react to the kids banging on the glass” as easily as it could mean “the talk at the bear exhibit was really mentally stimulating for me and I left happy with how much I’d learned.” If you’re a zoo executive who just launched a new PR campaign to draw in guests, you might think the former was indicative success - even though it’s objectively not the experience you want to curate. Similarly, if you’re someone who really has a moral issue with animal use in zoos solely for recreational purposes, you might listen to the latter and write off the facility they’re talking about because they’re curating “entertainment” - even if the person actually is referring to their engagement with the conservation and educational programming.
So how do you craft an experience that fits neatly into the general public’s box of enjoyment but doesn’t slide into being entertaining? According to a lot of modern messaging from the zoological and sanctuary industries that’s what everyone should be doing. But it doesn’t work like that, because everyone’s perspective on what that means is different! For the sake of exposition, let’s put aside the obviously contentious aspects of exhibition like “animals doing tricks” and “exploiting trauma narratives” and look at where even the “ideal” facilities run into issues with this.
Let’s take for example what is often held up as the “perfect” facility: a big, well-funded, accredited, non-profit institution with incredible amounts of conservation messaging, calls to action, empathy-building initiatives, etc. But you know what? Stick even the most stereotypical family in there for a day, and you’re going to get a range of experiences. The eight-year-old boy might be entertained by his day: he’s more into machines and cars than animals, so he’s really enthused by the carousel, but he thinks seeing the camels try to mate is hilarious. For him, it’s just a short, attention-diverting day that he won’t think about for long and might not choose to revisit as he gets older. But for the teenage girl who dreams of being a vet, it’s an immensely enjoyable and inspiring experience: she rolls her eyes at her brother’s inappropriate antics, falls in love with the tiger training demo of voluntary blood draws, and floats home on cloud nine. It’s an experience that has massively reinforced her desire to work with animals, and she’ll remember it for months and beg her parents to take her back as soon as possible. For an even greater variety of experience, let’s say mom is neither entertained or finds it enjoyable: she’s busy wrangling two kids in the summer heat, plus a husband who thinks it’s funny to make obnoxious noises at the gorilla. Dad probably finds it both an enjoyable and entertaining day: he finds getting to spend some time with his family pleasurable, and finds entertainment in watching his son learn about the parts of the circle of life they don’t put in the nature documentaries for kiddos. (Hey, I did say this is stereotype.)
Four people. Four experiences. Some people entertained by the same exact thing that is immensely enjoyable for other people in their family. Other than a proclivity towards annoying the apes, are any of those experiences inappropriate? Wrong? Bad? Antithetical to what the zoo is trying to proctor, contrary to ethical animal exhibition? Not really. They’re just a range of experiences, specific to each individual, fit into a set of categories by the necessity of needing to use shared language to communicate. Should we condemn the little kid for not being old enough to really appreciate the experience of the zoo? Laud the teenager for being enlightened enough to move beyond finding the experience simply fun? No. That doesn’t make sense.
Heck, the specific context of a visitor’s day matters to how they perceive a facility visit. Why someone visits one day might be totally different than their experience on a repeat visit next week. Some visits I go to a zoo to engage with their programming and learn things that will impact my life and my habits. But some visits? Sometimes it’s been a bad day, and I just want to go be entertained by the acrobatics of the otters until I feel a little better. Is that specific visit - just the one where I want to be distracted by watching the otters - unethical? The dichotomy doesn’t make sense.
As I talked about in the previous post, entertainment vs enjoyment of animal exhibition has become sort of a moral shorthand for the experience. We hear the word entertainment, and we think of stereotypes of animal abuse and shallow, superficial experiences that are detrimental to animal welfare. And so it’s become that people feel like the entire concept of entertainment - of being entertained in any way when you’re around captive animals - is inherently unethical and wrong by association. Even if there isn’t any visible abuse, even if the animal welfare is stellar, public messaging has equated the concepts together so heavily that the discomfort often persists. Surprisingly, zoos and other captive animal exhibition facilities have chosen to contribute to that perception. Zoos and sanctuaries both frequently perpetuate it as part of their brand differentiation, especially in the era of media such as Blackfish and Tiger King: many zoos do it in order to separate themselves from their competition, and many sanctuaries utilize the messaging to justify why their style of exhibition is ethical.
At the end of the day, pitting entertainment against enjoyment as incompatible moral constructs within the captive exotic animal industry simply isn’t useful. Without clear definitions, people interpret both terms according to their own internal frameworks, and the terms end up losing meaning the more frequently they’re used.