Entertainment and Resonance

This chapter aims to differentiate between two kinds of media use experiences that in the past twenty some years have uniformly been labeled entertainment experiences. In the background of four identified fundamental assumptions in entertainment theory (entertainment as reception phenomenon, disparity between what media users want and what they should want, entertainment between approaching and avoiding affective states, entertainment as self-transcendence) media experiences are dichotomized between those that serve users’ hedonic motivations, needs, and interests and others, more fundamental experiences of resonance (which in the recent past have often been labeled eudaimonic) that connect users to the content of a media narrative and ultimately changes them. The argument is made here for communication scholars and media psychologists to refer to entertainment experiences only in the first case in order to be less vague and ambiguous in explicating entertainment theory.