Entertainment is an occasion, piece, or movement designed to give enjoyment or leisure to an audience. The audience may join in the entertainment passively as in actively as in computer games. The playing of sports and reading of journalism are usually included in entertainment, but these are regularly called activity more specifically, because they involve some energetic participation past mere leisure. While people have laughing themselves since the beginning of time, the entertainment industry first became a leading force in culture in the 20th century with the development of latest electronic technologies of recording and spreading.
Western peoples, tired of serious purposes and gathering massacre, turned to popular culture following the two world wars. The financial basis of this new culture was advertising of free or inexpensive entertainment program. In their peak, television networks were great selling machines which, besides entertaining people, prohibited both commercial and political markets by providing direct access to the group of customers. This "territory" is now in danger by the explosion and segmentation of media and especially by the growing importance of communication by computer which allows the consumer to look for out the informational message as an alternative of having it broadcast to him or her. A new system of world history sees Americans in changeover between a fourth, entertainment-based "society" and a future fifth evolution based on computer communication.