ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that entertainment plays a prominent role in our everyday lives. More than anything else, it is the media that provide their users with an ever increasing variety of opportunities to be amused, to have fun and pleasure, to be delighted and enlightened, in short, to be entertained. When viewing the changes, both within our economy as well as in our leisure-time activities, it cannot be denied that entertainment has become more indispensable than ever before. As Wolf (1999) claimed, “Entertainment—not autos, not steel, not financial services—is fast becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy” (p. 4). And with respect to our preferred leisure-time activities, researchers not only agree that entertainment is what most people are looking for (Zillmann & Vorderer, 2000, for an overview), some even predict “that entertainment will define, more than ever before, the civilizations to come” (Zillmann, 2000a, p. 18).
