Entertainment: Good vs. Bad

Listening to music, watching television and old movies on the big screen, going to Broadway productions, doing countless quizzes on Facebook, and watching Granny hit a honking car with her purse on YouTube has become normal everyday life in America today, and has, in ways of society, shaped it differently than it was a few years ago. These new forms of entertainment, I think, have both ruined and helped today’s society in many ways.

Entertainment has ruined our society in ways of bonding between children and their parents. Because of iPods, Internet, and big screen televisions, children have grown away from their parents and have spent less and less time together. I know I have been so obsessed with the newest songs, television shows, Facebook quizzes, and YouTube videos, that, sometimes, I don’t even realize that my mom was talking to me until she’s already grounded me for a week for not putting down the iPod or letting go of the computer mouse while she’s talking to me.

At the same time, though, entertainment has helped our society to grown and to flourish. With the help of this little thing called entertainment, we can learn a lot about other countries and states and apply it to our own lives. Not all of the YouTube videos we watch are made by our next door neighbors; not every song is created by the same person with only one view of life; and not every movie is created in the United States or with our opinions on a subject. With the use of entertainment, our society is able to grow with the use of examples from other places.

Entertainment can also be ruining our economical society. With websites like YouTube, listening to and watching music videos, as well as videos alike, are free. Also, when listening to music, software like iTunes tries to help the economical society by charging the listener a certain amount of money per song they download. But at the same time, software like LimeWire allows the listener to download as many songs as they want, free of charge. Facebook also doesn’t help in today’s economical society. Facebook is a free website that people spend their whole lives on. We spend hours writing on our friends’ ”walls,” “tagging” people in the pictures we just uploaded, and having “poke wars” with people with the “poke” application, all while not spending a dime.

Entertainment is both ruining and supporting today’s society. It has helped to shape our society and change it over the years. Entertainments such as YouTube, Facebook, music, television, and movies have had both positive and negative effects on today’s economical and general society.