Interview with Interview with Martin Kaplan
"Entertainment, understood as the art of capturing and maintaining attention is the most important force today"
May , 2007 / By Àngels Doñate (UOC) and Miriam Pita
Martin Kaplan
Professor Martin Kaplan speaks passionately about the power of entertainment in the twenty first
century, ranging from the final instalment of the Sopranos to Greek tragedies, from the speeches of
the Bush government to South American TV soaps and football. For this communications expert, even
our lives are mere entertainment: a story that we tell day after day and during which we dream of
reaching the next chapter.
Understood like this, entertainment is much more than simple fun: it is the art of capturing and
maintaining attention. Who doesn't want to dominate it? He talked to lecturers and experts about
this power and its future, its negative and positive effects, of how new technologies impact on it
during his visit to the UOC.
What is entertainment and what is it not for Martin Kaplan?
I believe that entertainment is what people normally think it is and… something more. The traditional definition is ‘fun’, but I believe that it goes much deeper, and more so these days. If we consider the Latin root of the word, we can see that it means ‘to capture and maintain attention’. If we look at it this way, anyone in the world of show business, TV or the music industry has to capture and maintain the attention of their audience. But so do politicians, for example, when they want people to vote for them and they have to capture the attention of the audience and the press, and journalists, when they need to capture attention with their message. The same is true for a lecturer, who has to capture the attention of their students and, in religion, a priest, who has to capture the attention of people who attend church. I view entertainment as something that transcends all spheres of society. What is not entertainment? Probably mathematics.
What have an opera by Verdi, an episode of The Sopranos or a theme park like Disney World got in common?
All three are efforts to capture someone's attention and the way in which they do it is fairly similar. All three are narratives in which we as individuals dramatise a theatre… As we live, we are invited to dramatise a role on stage that is our life. Both if it is more highbrow art and if it is popular art, we want to go on to the next scene of our film, be in the next chapter of our story. In our internal life, we all in some way tell ourselves the story: “and this happened to me, and this also happened to me”. This way, everyone composes their life as though it were a story, which is always different when you go back, because there is new material that is added to the end. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood looking back, but it can only be lived looking forward.
Entertainment has been around since the start of civilisation: the Greek tragedies, the Roman circus, and so on. Does it play a more important role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I think that entertainment is probably the most important force in contemporary society. I personally would also include sports in this idea and, if you were to ask me what part of this force is most important in Barcelona, with my short visit, I would say that it is football. And the fact that it plays such an important role is not trivial; it is very interesting because it serves as a story: how the last match went or how the next one will go, and how people talk about it… All of this is the material of their ideas and is in some way more attractive and important than politics as a story. If we measure it on the basis of what people do normally, I think that it is true. We tend to underrate entertainment and we think that things like Homer and the Greeks and the things that we studied at school are highbrow art, but we forget that in the days of Homer and Greek tragedy, it was in fact Homer and tragedy that were popular entertainment. Competitions were organised to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey, and ten thousand people would go along to see who did it best, very similar in a way to going to a football match today. What we call “highbrow academic art” now was popular art in those days, in other words I think that entertainment plays a decisive role in modern life. For example, when you go out shopping, you go to a shop not just to buy, but there's also a certain element of theatre to it: the shop is designed like a theme park, it's an experience, and what you buy is an emotional expectation that will bear a certain relation to your life and your story. You tell yourself “if I buy those shoes, I'll be happy, and consequently people will say things to me”, and this doesn't just happen when you go shopping; it also happens virtually with every experience of modern life.
What have technologies brought and what will they bring to this field? Will they break down barriers of space and time, bring realities closer?
New technologies have broken down the distinction between creator and audience. Before this, there was one set of people who entertained and another who consumed entertainment, but now people who are online create entertainment. For example, on YouTube, almost everything, if not everything, is created by people who post things so that others can read them and react. The same occurs with almost all the part of the text that is published online. What the film or radio studios or publishers used to do, now anyone can do from their laptop; now, anyone can be a creator or entertainer, and potentially we have within our grasp the whole world to do this. At present, content is not created top-down, but bottom-up, or it is created by both. I was interested to see how George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, recently released the first Star Wars to his fans online so that they could cut it, re-edit it and create a new story. He was saying to them “OK. I'm giving you the raw material; now you’re the director.” It does not matter who you are. There are problems with copyright and intellectual property, but everyone can create content and publish it. It is an exciting progress: there are as many bad things as when it is done traditionally, but there is more entertainment.
The spectator lets down the barriers of protection or critical capacity in leisure or entertainment spaces. They consider it inoffensive and unintentional. We become vulnerable and can be manipulated in some way. What can happen? What can scriptwriters, producers, the industry really do? Can they change our way of seeing things or of acting?
That's a very serious, important and complicated question. I think that if the people who make television and films were asked that, they would reply that their job is to entertain and make money, that their job is not to send out a message or change opinion or inform or create propaganda; it is to capture an audience and make it pay them money. But it is possible – and this is what I have tried to do – to make them aware of their power over people.
I think that the best research that has been conducted in this area comes from soap operas. There was a soap in Argentina called Simplemente María, which was about a poor young woman who worked as a maid who was ill-treated by her masters. During the soap, she learned to read and write and get a job for herself, and in the end she gets married. When she got married, the whole of Argentina took a holiday because they wanted to see the wedding on television, not just because it was an interesting story but because it encouraged very many poor, uneducated Argentinian women to say “I too can learn to read and write, I can study in the evenings, I can improve.” It is slowly being seen that soaps can be used to educate people – they can be educated about safe sex or about how important it is to vote – and that, all over the world, becomes an incredible force for good. In the United States, this phenomenon is less developed than in other countries because it is often done in these countries as the TV channels belong to the government, which wants to spread the message about what is important, whereas in the United States, it's basically a private business and for that reason they don't want to be told what they have to do. For this reason, what I have been doing for the last six years in this area has been to offer a free service to TV producers and writers – especially with regard to health – to which, if they have a story about people who are ill, doctors or health, we provide an expert free of charge who they can consult and so they didn’t have to make up the story. What used to happen was that a writer decided that their character had to be ill, they made up a name for the illness and said what they had to do; what they didn't realise was that the people watching the programme really thought that it was true and they believed it, even knowing that it was entertainment. Consequently, what we do is provide helpful information to the writers so that they convey it to the audience. Their power can also work negatively. In the series 24, vary famous in Asia, the lead character, Jack Bauer, is a secret agent who works for the government and has to prevent terrorist plots. The suspects are caught and tortured, and under torture they say that there are bombs and where they are… Now, anyone with experience in anti-terrorism knows that this doesn't work and that if you torture someone, they'll tell you what you want to hear; the way to get correct information is to become their friends and create trust. The problem is that this series, 24, has become very well known not just among the general public but also among students training for military service. At West Point, our military academy, the teacher tells the students “read the textbook, the message is do not torture, it doesn't work”, and these students watch TV at night and see the opposite message, and who do they believe? The television series. As a consequence, the head of cadets at West Point had to visit Hollywood to tell the scriptwriters on the series “Don't do it, they believe you, not their teachers.” And subsequently, the people from the programme visited West Point – including the star, Kiefer Sutherland – to say “I'm only an actor, it’s a TV series, it is not real, don't believe what we say.” Despite this, the politicians in favour of torture in the Bush administration think that the series is fantastic and they use it because they want people to be on their side and to be able to say that torture can be useful in emergency situations. This is an example of how this force can be negative, even when you consider that the people from the programme don’t want to send out this message.
Do you think that some of the codes of entertainment activities can be applied to teaching to make it more attractive? Which ones? How?
I think so. The aim of teaching is for people to pay attention, and who better to capture the attention than artists, scriptwriters, actors and writers? Therefore, I think that if the materials are varied and interactive and they invite people to become part of the process, they ensure that attention is maintained and not lost, and what for me is really exciting is the ability to convey information not just in traditional ways, such as text, but also with the story-telling mechanisms of entertainment.
What is entertainment and what is it not for Martin Kaplan?
I believe that entertainment is what people normally think it is and… something more. The traditional definition is ‘fun’, but I believe that it goes much deeper, and more so these days. If we consider the Latin root of the word, we can see that it means ‘to capture and maintain attention’. If we look at it this way, anyone in the world of show business, TV or the music industry has to capture and maintain the attention of their audience. But so do politicians, for example, when they want people to vote for them and they have to capture the attention of the audience and the press, and journalists, when they need to capture attention with their message. The same is true for a lecturer, who has to capture the attention of their students and, in religion, a priest, who has to capture the attention of people who attend church. I view entertainment as something that transcends all spheres of society. What is not entertainment? Probably mathematics.
What have an opera by Verdi, an episode of The Sopranos or a theme park like Disney World got in common?
All three are efforts to capture someone's attention and the way in which they do it is fairly similar. All three are narratives in which we as individuals dramatise a theatre… As we live, we are invited to dramatise a role on stage that is our life. Both if it is more highbrow art and if it is popular art, we want to go on to the next scene of our film, be in the next chapter of our story. In our internal life, we all in some way tell ourselves the story: “and this happened to me, and this also happened to me”. This way, everyone composes their life as though it were a story, which is always different when you go back, because there is new material that is added to the end. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood looking back, but it can only be lived looking forward.
Entertainment has been around since the start of civilisation: the Greek tragedies, the Roman circus, and so on. Does it play a more important role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I think that entertainment is probably the most important force in contemporary society. I personally would also include sports in this idea and, if you were to ask me what part of this force is most important in Barcelona, with my short visit, I would say that it is football. And the fact that it plays such an important role is not trivial; it is very interesting because it serves as a story: how the last match went or how the next one will go, and how people talk about it… All of this is the material of their ideas and is in some way more attractive and important than politics as a story. If we measure it on the basis of what people do normally, I think that it is true. We tend to underrate entertainment and we think that things like Homer and the Greeks and the things that we studied at school are highbrow art, but we forget that in the days of Homer and Greek tragedy, it was in fact Homer and tragedy that were popular entertainment. Competitions were organised to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey, and ten thousand people would go along to see who did it best, very similar in a way to going to a football match today. What we call “highbrow academic art” now was popular art in those days, in other words I think that entertainment plays a decisive role in modern life. For example, when you go out shopping, you go to a shop not just to buy, but there's also a certain element of theatre to it: the shop is designed like a theme park, it's an experience, and what you buy is an emotional expectation that will bear a certain relation to your life and your story. You tell yourself “if I buy those shoes, I'll be happy, and consequently people will say things to me”, and this doesn't just happen when you go shopping; it also happens virtually with every experience of modern life.
What have technologies brought and what will they bring to this field? Will they break down barriers of space and time, bring realities closer?
New technologies have broken down the distinction between creator and audience. Before this, there was one set of people who entertained and another who consumed entertainment, but now people who are online create entertainment. For example, on YouTube, almost everything, if not everything, is created by people who post things so that others can read them and react. The same occurs with almost all the part of the text that is published online. What the film or radio studios or publishers used to do, now anyone can do from their laptop; now, anyone can be a creator or entertainer, and potentially we have within our grasp the whole world to do this. At present, content is not created top-down, but bottom-up, or it is created by both. I was interested to see how George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, recently released the first Star Wars to his fans online so that they could cut it, re-edit it and create a new story. He was saying to them “OK. I'm giving you the raw material; now you’re the director.” It does not matter who you are. There are problems with copyright and intellectual property, but everyone can create content and publish it. It is an exciting progress: there are as many bad things as when it is done traditionally, but there is more entertainment.
The spectator lets down the barriers of protection or critical capacity in leisure or entertainment spaces. They consider it inoffensive and unintentional. We become vulnerable and can be manipulated in some way. What can happen? What can scriptwriters, producers, the industry really do? Can they change our way of seeing things or of acting?
That's a very serious, important and complicated question. I think that if the people who make television and films were asked that, they would reply that their job is to entertain and make money, that their job is not to send out a message or change opinion or inform or create propaganda; it is to capture an audience and make it pay them money. But it is possible – and this is what I have tried to do – to make them aware of their power over people.
I think that the best research that has been conducted in this area comes from soap operas. There was a soap in Argentina called Simplemente María, which was about a poor young woman who worked as a maid who was ill-treated by her masters. During the soap, she learned to read and write and get a job for herself, and in the end she gets married. When she got married, the whole of Argentina took a holiday because they wanted to see the wedding on television, not just because it was an interesting story but because it encouraged very many poor, uneducated Argentinian women to say “I too can learn to read and write, I can study in the evenings, I can improve.” It is slowly being seen that soaps can be used to educate people – they can be educated about safe sex or about how important it is to vote – and that, all over the world, becomes an incredible force for good. In the United States, this phenomenon is less developed than in other countries because it is often done in these countries as the TV channels belong to the government, which wants to spread the message about what is important, whereas in the United States, it's basically a private business and for that reason they don't want to be told what they have to do. For this reason, what I have been doing for the last six years in this area has been to offer a free service to TV producers and writers – especially with regard to health – to which, if they have a story about people who are ill, doctors or health, we provide an expert free of charge who they can consult and so they didn’t have to make up the story. What used to happen was that a writer decided that their character had to be ill, they made up a name for the illness and said what they had to do; what they didn't realise was that the people watching the programme really thought that it was true and they believed it, even knowing that it was entertainment. Consequently, what we do is provide helpful information to the writers so that they convey it to the audience. Their power can also work negatively. In the series 24, vary famous in Asia, the lead character, Jack Bauer, is a secret agent who works for the government and has to prevent terrorist plots. The suspects are caught and tortured, and under torture they say that there are bombs and where they are… Now, anyone with experience in anti-terrorism knows that this doesn't work and that if you torture someone, they'll tell you what you want to hear; the way to get correct information is to become their friends and create trust. The problem is that this series, 24, has become very well known not just among the general public but also among students training for military service. At West Point, our military academy, the teacher tells the students “read the textbook, the message is do not torture, it doesn't work”, and these students watch TV at night and see the opposite message, and who do they believe? The television series. As a consequence, the head of cadets at West Point had to visit Hollywood to tell the scriptwriters on the series “Don't do it, they believe you, not their teachers.” And subsequently, the people from the programme visited West Point – including the star, Kiefer Sutherland – to say “I'm only an actor, it’s a TV series, it is not real, don't believe what we say.” Despite this, the politicians in favour of torture in the Bush administration think that the series is fantastic and they use it because they want people to be on their side and to be able to say that torture can be useful in emergency situations. This is an example of how this force can be negative, even when you consider that the people from the programme don’t want to send out this message.
Do you think that some of the codes of entertainment activities can be applied to teaching to make it more attractive? Which ones? How?
I think so. The aim of teaching is for people to pay attention, and who better to capture the attention than artists, scriptwriters, actors and writers? Therefore, I think that if the materials are varied and interactive and they invite people to become part of the process, they ensure that attention is maintained and not lost, and what for me is really exciting is the ability to convey information not just in traditional ways, such as text, but also with the story-telling mechanisms of entertainment.