Are you a passive or active consumer of Entertainment…?
Since the pandemic started two years ago, people have had no choice but to abandon their community and move from active entertainment to passive entertainment. Passive entertainment, a relatively new term, is where you put yourself on autopilot and expect to immerse yourself in a whole new surroundings. Streaming movies on Netflix, listening to music on Spotify, browsing on Instagram, and even reading books are all passive entertainment because of their lack of interaction. Passive or not, millions of people love doing these activities because they bring pleasure to us. Despite some experts who claim that passive entertainment offers low-value pleasure but consumes our high value asset (time), its popularity and user base continues to grow rapidly worldwide. However, the criticisms have raised some important questions: Is our beloved passive entertainment offering us everything we need? Can it do more?
The Past Doesn’t Always Define the Future
Thanks to the fast advancement of technology, passive entertainment is already becoming less passive, more interactive, even intelligent by offering us personalised choices. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime collect and analyse our past behaviours data to predict our future choices, i.e., the platforms present us with entertainment recommendations. This behavioural data driven decision-making process is not unique to the entertainment industry – it’s also ubiquitous in e-commerce, digital marketing, gaming, hospitality, transport and many technology businesses.
These platforms observe our behaviours, learn from our responses; and use our feedback to add to theirknowledge base in order to maximise the success of future recommendations. At a first glance, everything seems to work. However, there are a few of problems with this.
1). Our behaviours in the past don’t always indicate what we need, or should and want to do in the future. For example, just because I spent the last 4 hours watching Game of Thrones back-to-back, it doesn’t mean I should or love to watch more. In fact, it might be quite the opposite.
2) We may be presented with many choices and recommendations, but we rarely question the how and why. Even if we know how the algorithm works, how often can we influence them to better meet our needs? Without more autonomy on the information we receive, we might have the freedom to choose but do we really have the freedom to think?
The Importance of Motivational States
Entertainment is Emotion. (Tan, E. S. H. 2008)
The pandemic has deepened our love for passive entertainment. As we invest more money and time into doing these activities, we became even more emotionally attached. The problem is that unlike real life conversations, our relationship with entertainment is a one-way street. Entertainment is designed to make us happy but whether we are or we aren’t, currently, it doesn’t know or ‘care’.
Entertainment platforms use algorithms, every algorithm has a feedback loop to improve itself. What we are not seeing on these platforms are their efforts to seek responses around our motivational states (i.e., emotions, mood and affect). For example, if my intention is to use entertainment to improve my mood and to relax, the search option for this intention is not yet there. Or, if I feel regret after watching something, how do we give such feedback to get appropriate actions.
Emotion, mood, and affect may all influence our behaviour and decision-making. Technology is good at simulating our cognitive decision making but our emotional decision-making process is using a different part of our brain. Emotion theorists believe emotion is a major determinant in action (Ekman, 1999). If an AI program does not consider these states before suggesting actions, then how can we really define AI as a system that thinks and acts like a human. At the end of the day, when it comes to the things that really matter, it is never about technology, it’s always about the Human, and Humans are emotional, even irrational sometimes.
The Need to Make Passive Entertainment Better
Entertainment will continue to play an important role our lives, especially passive entertainment which brings pleasure when we need it the most. Some people even call it the “Big Mac for the brain”. We are happy when we immerse ourselves in passive entertainment. Happiness is strong motivation to action. As we have learned from Positive Psychology, there are 3 dimensions of happiness (Seligman, 2002) and entertainment naturally helps us to reach the 1st dimension - ‘Pleasure and Gratification’, by fulfilling our needs for self-gratification, to release stress, to feel better about ourselves by meeting our social and self-esteem needs.
Entertainment can also improve our Cognitive Ability. A wave of new Social Science research also demonstrates that the quality of entertainment shows can influence us in important ways, shaping our thinking and political preferences, even affecting our cognitive ability such as raising children’s IQ if they had better access to watch shows like Sesame Street. Therefore, watching quality content will help us to reach the 2nd dimension of happiness: ‘Embodiment of Strengths and Virtues’.
We love stories. Research suggests that our love for stories links to imitation and how it impacts our social and cognitive processes. In other words, we can’t help but to try to understand what’s going on in the story, put ourselves in the fictional position, so that both our thoughts and feelings begin to be shaped more by the fiction than by our real-life situation. Watching someone else's life story might even inspire a new ‘Meaning and Purpose’ in our life. That’s the 3rd dimension of happiness.
We love entertainment, entertainment has the potential to lead us to a happier life and all we need is a little more emotional touch. The proposal is for the passive entertainment platforms to seek responses centred around our emotions and moods; and build their programs to carry out actions with the best intention for each and every one of us, therefore helping us to reach a new dimension of happiness.
Not Without Challenges
We humans don’t always do the right thing. We make plenty of irrational decisions based on emotions, that’s why we have undesirable behaviours like impulsive shopping, binge-watching and procrastination. Sometimes actions based on emotions might lead us astray. Understanding the impact of technology and behavioural change provide key insights for introducing new feature and content.
Talking about feelings and emotions can be hard and it requires trust and relationship. Just think about when someone ask you "How are you feeling today? How often do we say 'Good' without thinking and when in fact we were having a terrible time? Building a program that makes us feel accepting and safe to discuss our feelings is not easy. As mentioned earlier, our interaction with a machine depends on our trust of its intentions. But if its intention is to make a positive impact (making us happier), it certainly makes it easier to build trust.
Communication of our emotions is another challenge. Whether it is through typing or voice command, we use language and language is complex. As Dr. James McCabe explained in his recent article "Saying it Ten Ways - Future of Voice", that any language is a combination of ten layers in synchronicity. In other words, you can say a thing in ten different ways.
Conclusion
Passive entertainment offers us pleasure, but it can do better, and we deserve better. There is nothing more ideal than feeling good, confident and fulfilled while being entertained. Streaming services are providing their version of the personalised experience by using our behavioural data. Since we already know our behaviours are irrational and our decision-making is influenced by emotions and moods, why can’t we attribute our emotions to such experience to make it truly personalised for us? Emotions and freedom to think are unique to humans, they are what makes us special so we can evolve into better versions of ourselves. It is time for technology to help us to do that. The responsibility of creating better technology lies with us – to explore ideas, asking questions, and ensuring such technology has the best intention to make a positive impact.
This article is written by Jing Reilly. Jing Reilly is a CyberPsychologist and Consumer CyberPsychology Lead for Area22.
Area22 are focused on transforming our experience of search in the Metaverse by leveraging the power of conversational voice. Conversational voice has the capacity to completely re-write how we all engage with technology - bringing us closer to a real human experience.
References
Ekman, P. (1999). Basic Emotions. Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, 98(45-60), 16.
Rothwell, J. (2019, August 2). You Are What You Watch? The Social Effects of TV. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/upshot/social-effects-television.html
Seligman, M. E. (2002). Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy. Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2(2002), 3-12.
Shashwat, K. (2018, September 15). Active and Passive Entertainment - Why are they important and which one fills most of your leisure? Medium. https://medium.com/@ksacha137/active-and-passive-entertainment-why-are-they-important-and-which-one-fills-most-of-your-leisure-2b54e423d69f
Stromberg, P. (2009, August 29). Why is Entertainment so Entertaining?. Psychology Today.https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-drugs-and-boredom/200908/why-is-entertainment-so-entertaining
Tan, E. S. H. (2008). Entertainment is emotion: The functional architecture of the entertainment experience. Media psychology, 11(1), 28-51.