Hello, Blogosphere!

Hello there, and welcome to my blog! If you're looking for celebrity gossip or movie trailers, you may want to continue on your journey now, because you won't find them here. The issues facing entertainment today are much deeper than Brad Pitt's ugly beard or whether Lindsay Lohan can carry out her next movie role with a SCRAM bracelet on her ankle, and our entertainment industry is a treasure we should protect. Now, hear me out; some people look at entertainment as a luxury, right? Well damn, wouldn't that be swell? But, entertainment doesn't just mirror our society; in many ways, entertainment shapes society, and so much of  world culture is created through entertainment media precedent, it's frightening. Children and young adults are the most vulnerable due to their natural impressionability, and if the entertainment they consume is bullshit, the consequences can be very serious. With our current new media entertainment, what will the next generation of Tweeting, Megavideo-watching, Limewire-abusing techies grow up to be? Questions like these are often very much unanswerable, but a little theoretical exploration never hurt anyone, and I sincerely believe that the direction of entertainment is a hugely important social issue with the ability to truly shape society--for better OR worse. Thus, with the hope of uncovering some of the major underlying issues with the current American entertainment industry, I have begun this blog. 
I, like many others, understand that the changing state of entertainment cannot be summed up easily, and that it’s future is very much up in the air. That said, the purpose of this blog will be to pick away at some of the layering effects of current technology, culture, and financial matters on the industry and its artistic direction. I'm hoping to explore all aspects of the field and provide some valuable insight for myself and readers as to how suffering areas of the industry may be fixed for the future.

I have many questions that I hope to answer (or at least deeply consider) throughout the course of my blog. I have graced the surface of many of these questions in my university Communications classes, but I hope with this blog that I can get some fervent discourse between myself, audiences, fellow students, and other media content on a range of highly important and complex topics. The overarching question I hope to answer is this: with America in an economic recession and web 2.0 technology making peer-to-peer sharing easier than ever, how has the entertainment industry responded to these industry-threatening changes? Have piracy and the state of the American economy had negative consequences on the quality of entertainment content? Or are the major industry players rising to meet challenges and inspiring audiences when they most need it? 

 Torrent-format films are now just a click away from the comfort of, well, anywhere with web access. And who would ever pay $13 to sit in a cold theater to see a movie when you can watch it at home for free—especially in such dire economic times? Have technologies like 3D movies or cost-per-click, web-based advertising done enough financial catch-up to negate the challenges that threaten the business of entertainment (i.e. piracy and peer-to-peer sharing)? And if not, then from where comes the motivation for artists and producers to create avant-garde, fresh entertainment? Without financial reward, I fear that brilliantly creative minds will begin taking their talent out of entertainment and transferring to more stably lucrative fields. What a shame it would be if Quentin Tarantino packed up his screenwriting career and left Hollywood for a more steady pay-check in freelance textbook writing? Hell, he'd eventually lose that job to a Kindle and an out-sourced company in India somehow. But, all scare-tactics aside, these are very real concerns of mine, and I hope to enlighten my readers as much as I possibly can. I'm no expert, but hey, I have the world at my fingertips (and in my Google search-bar).

As I said, I have just barely graced the surface of these issues, so it is highly possible that these fears of mine may never transpire into legitimate turmoil. That said I'm rightfully worried about the survival of one of the greatest and most influential entertainment industries in the world, so I hope that here I will be able to chip away at some of the questions I have and invite others to contribute. After all, while new media has posed its challenges to entertainment, it is an amazing tool for collaboration and education. So please, feel free to share anything you may think is relevant or interesting!