Entertainment is something so commonplace today, it’s everywhere we look. Phones, TV and computers have access to so much media that an endless stream of entertainment is seconds away at any given moment. This wasn’t always the case.

If we look back to 11th century Scotland using Macbeth as our reference, we can see one of a few different possibilities. The first possibility is that people were too poor for entertainment. Because entertainment didn’t come to you, you were going out and paying money for a play, a brothel or to the prison. These things cost money and at the bottom of this medieval hierarchical structure, money is something people didn’t have a lot of. People at the bottom also had very little time for entertainment. Peasants were on work, eat, sleep then repeat. The second possibility is you were middle class. Maybe you owned some land or maybe you had a slightly better job than working the land for crops. If this was you, you got to see the occasional play. Although you weren’t rich, every once and a while you could sneak away and be entertained. The last possibility is you were rich. A lord or a king and entertainment would come to you. Entertainment would be in the form of play companies, women or whoever else needed money. Kings and Lords were the top of society but their access to entertainment still doesn’t compare to ours. Entertainment wise, we aren’t kings, we’re gods. To show this I made this pyramid of hierarchy style graphic.

In today’s society our access to entertainment is only dictated by whether our boss will catch us switching tabs or if we forgot our lighting cable. We’ve reached this point only in the last 20ish years with smartphones being the medium in which the majority of our time is spent. As one of the first of the generation where smart cellphones were always a thing, I can say almost for certain that this will have a major impact on humanity. Less face to face communication but more communication overall. Whether the cellphones overall impact is for better or worse, is impossible to say, but the impact itself is huge and indefinite. Studies show that at least 3 out of 4 people in the USA have a cellphone. Studies also show that 50 percent of young people admit cellphone addiction along with average use being 5 hours a day. I thought this graph was pretty all encompassing of the situation.

Entertainment has moved from backstage to the forefront of society since the writings of Macbeth. The power of entertainment is undeniable but it’s up to us to make that a positive or negative. I believe that the ease of access to entertainment will continue to grow until more serious consequences begin to appear to more people. Maybe one day, entertainment will become more obsolete, bringing society back to a Elizabethan vibe but until then, the contrast is real.