I think that Allan Bloom covers this in "Closing of the American Mind". IIRC, he says that leisure time was once scarce and was eagerly used by people in order to truly enjoy life and/or to better themselves. Nowadays we have more leisure time, we often don't know what to do, and too many of us flop in front of the TV and say "Entertain me".
Sad.
Thanks. There is also this:
http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/0140094385
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), is a book by Neil Postman in which he argues that mediums of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment.