Entertainment Is a Journey, Not Just a Destination

Abstract

This chapter takes a process view of the entertainment experience by discussing how one can define an experience as a process and how media experience processes contribute to entertainment. Against the background of general theories about time, process, and measurement, an entertainment process is conceptualized as a set of characteristic sequences of intelligibly connected events based on specific rules and parameters of time. These characteristic events could be seen as entertainment experiences themselves, but they also contribute to a final evaluation after media exposure. Although most communication scholars concur that entertainment has processual aspects and therefore measure responses or experiences during exposure, a perspective on the process as a whole (i.e., its time dependency and consequences) is rarely investigated. Therefore, the process perspective is analyzed using a number of entertainment theories. This research posits that entertainment theories as well as the measurement of entertainment processes could benefit from a more detailed exposition about the theoretical assumptions on the shape of a process.