Men have a natural craving for spectacles. We get bored easily and we are always on a lookout for entertainment.
In ancient Rome, the game of gladiators is a bloody form of spectacle, created specifically to keep the people of Roman empire entertained and thus, distract them from political and social issues that might roil the society.
And it worked well. For hundreds of years, Romans were fascinated by the cold-blooded and murderous game, flocking to the arenas across the empire to watch and cheer the “heroic” warriors fighting for their lives, admiring the killing of others as a glorious act. Sometimes wild beasts were let into the arena, making the game more barbaric but bringing up the adrenaline level of the audience.
Ancient Egyptians had a morbid obsession with dead things, including dead bodies, animals and insects. However, they preferred a more civilized form of entertainment without death involved.
Large-scale gatherings, such as banquets and parties accompanied by singing and dancing performances, were more to the liking of ancient Egyptians. But they were also notorious for their overindulgence in alcohol and food on such occasions. Sometimes they’d binge eat and drink until they throw up.
The Chinese already started to enjoy acrobatics and circus acts more than 2,000 years ago. They still dominate acrobatics today with some of the performances looking impossible and dangerous for humans. But that is also part of the thrill and the purpose of that particular form of entertainment.
A few thousand years has passed in human civilization. In a much more civilized world, gory games and indecent feasts can no longer find their places, while acrobatic performance remains a stage act that often comes with an expensive ticket. However, the demand for those spectacles has not waned. There is just a change in the form of their presentation.
With the leap of technological advancement, popular entertainment brought by the media, such as news, TV and movies, has now commandeered the attention of the audience around the world. Instead of going to the real events, now we can watch everything on a screen.
We can still see the spectacles of gladiators, feasts and acrobatics, created by modern technology and presented on TV and in theaters. When the special effects were just invented to re-create those spectacles, the audience could be easily impressed because they hadn’t seen the real things in their lives. But now, as more and more movies and TV shows use CGI (computer-generated images), the audience has also gotten used to the technology. These days, if a movie is not made with a few hundred million dollars and first-rate special effects, few will be in awe of the show.
The internet has taken it up a notch with fast dissemination of information. Now we can watch the news almost in real time as it happens. Clearly, there’s also a competition between media outlets, which are vying to be the first one to break the news. That in turn has brought up the demand for fast broadcasting, because everyone wants to be in the know immediately and constantly.
Some of the news today has become a form of entertainment too. Some reports come with grisly details of gruesome crimes; some are intentionally accompanied by disturbing or garish images or videos. This may sound cynical, but all these came along because there is a demand for them. If everyone thinks they are repulsive, these news reports wouldn’t have existed. They are in our lives because we need something juicier to kill the boredom.
The ability of instant broadcasting brought along by social networking services, such as micro-blogging, instant posts and live streaming, created another form of spectacle. In other words, it has given birth to a new group of people who want to create “spectacles”: Citizen journalists, investigators and online vigilantes. What these people are after is partly becoming the first one reporting “breaking news”, and in a larger part, seeking attention of the world. They are not paid for doing that, but they can become famous instantly, at least for a while.
But the audience are buying it. The faster these free online reports can reach the audience, the more comments they have from strangers in the world, and most importantly, the more exiting or disturbing they are, the more likely they can become a hit on the internet. That also means: the more famous the person who creates the original post becomes.
No matter how a spectacle is presented and what form the entertainment morphs into, our need for it is never dying and will only keep growing. We live in a world of overflowing information. There are way too many distractions and everything is screaming for our attention. Our attention span will get shorter, we will get bored more easily, and it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy our desire for spectacles.
References:
The Tip Box 