Twenty-First Century Entertainment

Apart from the first symptoms of the financial crisis, 2007 brought some symbolic events in the cultural sphere. In May, Facebook became available to all, and in June the first iPhone premiered. The changes that had been building for years in media and technology led to the triumphant launch of two brands that were swiftly acknowledged to be models of highly functional social platforms and mobile devices, joining the advantages of telephones and computers. Tied to this was a gamut of less publicized, yet vital transformations, such as Apple taking first place among music distributors—the digital iTunes replaced the classic Walmart.²

The effect of these infrastructural/technological changes was to bolster societal transformations that had long been underway. And also, perhaps, to create the foundations for an entirely new understanding of humanity as such.

Classic modes of interacting with culture, such as reading, began what was more than a tactical retreat. In Poland “[in] March 2022 when asked if they had read at least one book in the past twelve months of the study, 38% respondents answered in the affirmative.”³ Even France, where over ninety per cent of those surveyed had contact with literature in the year previous, print runs are in decline.⁴

At the same time, the gamer population is on the rise: 37.5 per cent of Europeans play at least an hour a week⁵ (on the average: 9.5 hours weekly). Game development studios are among the most quickly expanding branches of business—in Poland in 2016–20 their revenue rose from 300,000,000 million to almost half a billion euro.⁶ Before the pandemic, the number of cinema tickets purchased in the European Union oscillated around a solid billion.⁷

To conclude this carousel of statistics, let’s go back to the beginning. “Oddly enough, our bond with our telephones is felt when we are not doing anything with them. Paris researchers have observed that thirty-seven per cent of women and thirty per cent of men like to hold their phones even when they are not using them.”⁸

Many commentators see these tendencies as proof of substantial changes. Of course, there is always the probability that we are dealing with moral panic, much like that which accompanied the expansion of comics, television, or (however bizarre this sounds) the walkman. Yet we ought also to consider other interpretations, such as those pertaining to i-gen⁹ or the transition to post-writing.¹⁰ Both concepts could have far-reaching political consequences—they would mean that the emotional side of the media would have far greater significance. Yet here too a question arises—is this a new quality, or a return to a recent epoch, when a socialist learned about the world from a socialist newspaper, and a conservative read a conservative one?