In popular culture Are we having fun yet
Fun is the
enjoyment of pleasure, particularly in leisure activities. Fun is an experience
- short-term, often unexpected, informal, not cerebral and generally
purposeless. It is an enjoyable distraction, diverting the mind and body from
any serious task or contributing an extra dimension to it. Although
particularly associated with recreation and play, fun may be encountered during
work, social functions, and even seemingly mundane activities of daily living.
It may often have little to no logical basis, and opinions on whether or not an
activity is fun may differ. The distinction between enjoyment and fun is
difficult to articulate but real, fun being a more spontaneous, playful, or
active event. There are psychological and physiological implications to the
experience of fun.
The word is
associated with sports, high merriment, and amusement. Although its etymology
is uncertain, it may be derived from fonne (fool) and fonnen (the one fooling
the other). Its meaning in 1727 was "cheat, trick, hoax", a meaning
still retained in the phrase "to make fun of".
The landlady was going to reply, but was
prevented by the peace-making sergeant, sorely to the displeasure of Partridge,
who was a great lover of what is called fun, and a great promoter of those
harmless quarrels which tend rather to the production of comical than tragically
incidents.
The way the
word "fun" is used demonstrates its distinctive elusiveness.
Expressions such as "Have fun!" and "That was fun!" indicate
that fun is pleasant, personal, and to some extent unpredictable. Expressions
such as "I was making fun of myself" convey the sense that fun is
something that can be amusing and not to be taken seriously. The adjective
"funny" has two meanings which often need to be clarified between a
speaker and listener. One meaning is "amusing, jocular, droll" and
the other meaning is "odd, quirky, peculiar". These differences
indicate the evanescent and experiential nature of fun.
Fun's
evanescence can be seen when an activity regarded as fun becomes goal-oriented.
Many physical activities and individual sports are regarded as fun until the
participant seeks to win a competition, at which point, much of the fun may
disappear as the individual's focus tightens. Surfing is an example. If you are
a "mellow soul" (not in a competition or engaging in extreme sport)
"once you're riding waves, you're guaranteed to be having ... fun".
The pleasure
of fun can be seen by the numerous efforts to harness its positive associations.
For example, there are many books on serious subjects, about skills such as
music, mathematics and languages, normally quite difficult to master, which
have "fun" added to the title.
Psychology Employment
poster about the importance of fun
According to
Johan Huizinga, fun is "an absolutely primary category of life, familiar
to everybody at a glance right down to the animal level. Psychological studies
reveal both the importance of fun and its effect on the perception of time,
which is sometimes said to be shortened when one is having fun. As the adage
says: "Time flies when you're having fun".
It has been
suggested that games, toys, and activities perceived as fun are often
challenging in some way. When a person is challenged to think consciously,
overcome challenge and learn something new, they are more likely to enjoy a new
experience and view it as fun. A change from routine activities appears to be
at the core of this perception, since people spend much of a typical day
engaged in activities that are routine and require limited conscious thinking.
Routine information is processed by the brain as a "chunked pattern":
"We rarely look at the real world", according to game designer Raph
Koster, "we instead recognize something we have chunked, and leave it at
that. One might argue that the essence of much of art is in forcing us to see
things as they really are rather than as we assume them to be". Since it
helps people to relax, fun is sometimes regarded as a "social
lubricant", important in adding "to one's pleasure in life" and
helping to "act as a buffer against stress".
For children,
fun is strongly related to play and they have great capacity to extract the fun
from it in a spontaneous and inventive way. Play "involves the capacity to
have fun - to be able to return, at least for a little while, to never-never
land and enjoy it."
Physiology
Some scientists have
identified areas of the brain associated with the perception of novelty, which
are stimulated when faced with "unusual or surprising circumstances".
Information is initially received in the hippocampus, the site of long-term
memory, where the brain attempts to match the new information with recognizable
patterns stored in long-term memory. When it is unable to do this, the brain
releases dopamine, a chemical which stimulates the amygdale, the site of
emotion, and creates a pleasurable feeling that is associated with the new
memory. In other words, fun is created by stimulating the brain with novelty.
In popular culture Are we
having fun yet?
In the modern world, fun is
sold as a consumer product in the form of games, novelties, television, toys
and other amusements. Marxist sociologists such as the Frankfurt School criticize
mass-manufactured fun as too calculated and empty to be fully satisfying. Bill
Griffith satirizes this dysphasia when his cartoon character Zippy the Pinhead
asks mechanically, "Are we having fun yet?".
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