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A few months ago, at an international communication conference in Nairobi, Kenya, a delegate asked me about the purpose of my studies in popular entertainment media. She was of the opinion that mindless and escapist media programming was, as she put it, “downright trash” unworthy of academic study. Mindless and escapist perhaps, but as I explained, entertainment media is also the most popular genre of mass media programming, cutting across geographic, national, and cultural boundaries; it can be thought provoking, entertaining, educational, and enlightening all at once. For the next couple of hours, we talked about popular entertainment media and the value they hold for stimulating public discourses on social issues at the local, national, or global level and especially on topics that are considered “taboo”: sexuality, HIV/AIDS prevention, mental depression, ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination, and the like. Our talk was peppered with examples from all over the world and raised difficult questions: Can the commercial viability of popular global media be burdened by the weight of social responsibility? Or conversely, what additional value does the educational (social) content add to a popular entertainment genre, especially if there is seamless integration of entertainment and education? Where does entertainment begin and education stop?
Some examples especially illustrated my defense. In 1996, a colorful 21-inch by 27-inch poster-letter-manifesto with the signatures and thumbprints of 184 villagers of Lutsaan in India’s Uttar Pradesh state was mailed to All India Radio in New Delhi, which was then broadcasting an entertainment-education soap opera called Tinka Tinka Sukh (Happiness Lies in Small Things).
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