So, where does entertainment go from here?
A significant shift occurred with the advent of Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1980) proposed that producers encode messages into texts, but audiences decode them through three positions: dominant (accepting the intended meaning), negotiated (partially accepting), or oppositional (rejecting). Meanwhile, Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory (1998) suggested that heavy television viewing "cultivates" perceptions of reality that align with the most repetitive media representations (e.g., the "mean world syndrome" from excessive crime drama viewing). So, where does entertainment go from here