Wallace Stevens of “Art, Entertainment, Entropy” argues that while all art is experimental or research, the entertainment is a game or conflict. He states that entertainment is inherently entropic (opposed to change), and art to be inherently negentropic, a catalyst to change. Stevens applies the Laws of Thermodynamics that entropy is the amount of energy that can be exchanged in a reversible manner. He states that entertainment and art work in this manner.
His critique can relate to newer interactive entertainment media today. Today’s media such as facebook normally lack of predictability by itself as an entertainment. We need to have art in it to have reduction in entropy and correspond to increase in order. With the art, we can create the entertainment to be more interactive. Take facebook for example: we cannot only post blogs, but we can play games and compete with other facebook users. When Stevens published this article in 1970’s, most of the entertainments were not interactive since there were mainly films and cinemas. However, in today’s media, we can leave feedbacks and be interactive among other people on the entertainment media. Youtube is another great example that almost everybody knows they can leave criticism or positive feedbacks about a clip they’ve watched.
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