Spider Webs

Hofstadter talks about in pages 70 – 86 the concept of variations on themes. When Hofstadter began describing variations, I immediately thought ‘yep that seems right, variations are all around us’. But it wasn’t until I really started thinking about variations that I truly realized how encompassing the concept really is. Take for instance the theme of entertainment. Without being an expert on the field of entertainment even having a little knowledge about history one can see how the concept of entertainment has expanded and spider-webbed rapidly in the short existence of human kind.

This is not meant to be a thorough history of entertainment but only an example of how widespread variation is in the world. For instance story telling has been in part a form of entertainment since the earliest written records of man, this was in the beginning done orally possibly in front of the evening cook fires, later the theatre became big morphing oral story telling into a oral and visual way of telling a story as well as being able to tell the same story to large masses of people. But are there other ways to entertain large masses of people? Well what about athletics, the gladiatorial arena’s of ancient Rome for instance or maybe jousting in the kingdoms of medieval times. Certainly the cinema has had a large impact on entertainment, morphing the art of storytelling not only into a form of entertainment but also into a record of history, starting as silent films and eventually getting sound and voices (the talkies), and animation, recorded on a medium to be enjoyed again and again.

Entertainment grew from a few forms to many: Modern Cinema, music concerts covering most if not all genres, sporting events from young kids to the professionals, board games, card games, computer games. The list goes on. But entertainment is only one example and most definitely could be sub-divided into many more sub-concepts that are just as vastly spanning.