CONTEXT
Entertainment-Education (Edutainment) is a social change strategy incorporating educational messages into popular entertainment content to raise awareness, increase knowledge, create favorable attitudes and motivate people to take responsible action. As a means to positively impact changing culture and society, Edutainment receives increasing attention since the 1950’s in the scientific, media and academic communities. Storytelling is the oldest method of both entertainment and education, serving humanity as a source of cultural preservation and transfer of moral values.
Today, storytelling – and by extension Edutainment – uses a combination of arts such as oral narrative, music, dance, visual and digital arts. New technologies add interactivity and viewer participation to the process, drawing audiences even deeper into the subject matter. Edutainment provides viewers with new information and presents consequences of choices the story’s characters make, allowing viewers to develop new ways of thinking and decide what is appropriate to adopt personally and as members of a collective society.
The past and present impact of Hollywood and other production hubs around the world on cultural, social and economic issues is immeasurable. Whether or not they are intended as Edutainment programs, media productions often have great impact on society:
