Ludenism and Stephenson’s play theory: Illuminating notions of mass entertainment

Communication plays a vital role in human existence, because of the importance and effects of communication on the interrelationship of man and its environment, attempts have been made by scholars and philosophers to explain the effects and roles of communication on various man's activities, phenomena and events. And this has resulted in theories and postulations cutting across different eras’. These include mass society era, limited effect, scientific perspective, cultural era theories, and now technological/digital age era. This study conducted an inquiry into this phenomenon by using qualitative research, case study analysis and secondary qualitative data as methods for capturing data. Qualitative research methods allowed the researcher to examine how a kind of phenomenon structures and gives meaning to its occurrence. This kind of research signals an investigative enquiry that involves the collection, analysis and interpretation of data. For this work, the captured data have been analysed and interpreted by observing what effect Ludenism and Stephenson’s play theory have on mass entertainment in Nigeria. This study is a critique of William Stephenson's play theory of mass communication. His view that people use mass media mostly for play - that is, entertainment, pleasure and self-satisfaction rather than work (information and improvement) was true to some extent in the traditional society where the need of the people was small and their level of education low. For instance, more newspaper readers give more attention to comics, cartoons, sport pages, fashion columns, human angle stories and so on than they do to hard news and public service materials. Stephenson's philosophies are one, that life is centred on two major activities - work and play; thereby leaving out death. Two; that people use mass media for pleasure and entertainment rather than for information and improvement. This translates to the fact that the more media you have, the more of entertainment and pleasurable life becomes. To explain the theory, Stephenson used a data gathering procedure called Q-sort in his research on how different audiences, expressed as typical individuals, feel about the mass media.