Your mobile. Should we be depending on these devices for entertainment in addition to making and receiving our calls/data? I think it is perfectly OK. But to have TV with all of this? I am not too sure about that. The Feature today looks at this and if you are not careful, you might just find some of their musings to be quite accurate as well.

Conventional wisdom has it that entertainment applications will be the key to unleashing the next great wave of handheld mobile activity. If only handset manufacturers and mobile operators could figure out just what games people want to play, music they want to listen to or content they want to access, the industry will get through its current doldrums and escalate to the next level. Everybody who needs a cell phone already has one, now it’s time to get the people who don’t need one. And in a world where we’re either working or playing, the only other avenue is entertainment.

But what is entertainment, really? The roots of the word may surprise you. To entertain literally means “to hold within” (tain, as in “container,” and enter, as in, well, “enter”). And for many centuries, this idea of produced fun being forms of entertainment has held.

In Ancient Greece, the epic storyteller stood in the village square and attempted to hold the street audience within his spell of words. The great theater piece is called “captivating” for its ability to hold our attention long enough to watch the hero succeed or fail. Film, which has for all intents replaced theater, has the advantage of a tremendous screen and special effects, making it all the more easier for its craftspeople to hold us within the worlds they depict. Most movie trailers now begin with the phrase “in a world where…,” only underscoring cinema’s potential to bring us into another place, and keep us there.

Even television — “the idiot box” or “the boob tube” — induces us to be “couch potatoes,” so entrapped by its hypnotic spell that we may not move for hours. All of our “entertainments” throughout history, from peep shows and carnival acts to NASCAR races and religious revival meetings, strive to keep us captive to the content, eyes open, jaws lax and passive to the story. Though we may be at the edge of our seats, the only place we have to fall is further into the world of the entertainment.

That’s why “interactive entertainment” has always seemed to me something of an oxymoron. The moment a person truly interacts, she is brought out of that spell. And even if we decide that the kid playing Doom is just as captivated by the world of her game as someone else is watching Jaws in a movie theater, what about when that kid begins playing a networked game with some other kid? Is she captivated? Yes. Is she held within a particular world? Not necessarily.