Name: A brief history of media panics | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-09-01T19:25:13.000Z
Duration: 7 min 11 s
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This quote isn't talking about smartphones,

Adverbs of degree

It's actually from 1936 and it's talking about the radio.

OK, so this quote is talking about phone addiction,

but the phones in question are landlines. Remember them?

Well there was a time when people worried about

before it was the internet, then we had video nasties,

Meet Kirsten Drotner, Professor of Media Studies

...who's been writing about this topic for over 20 years.

The name I coined for it is a “media panic”.

Whenever a new medium arrives on the social scene

then we see these very, very stark emotional reactions.

According to Kirsten, when you look through history

one can see the same pattern of concern repeating itself -

often even using the same language and metaphors.

So today there's lots of talk of social media addiction,

But it's easy to forget that Pac-Man, Pinball and television

Or reports talk of the addictive “dark side” of social media,

echoing the way that computer games were described.

Or, another example, social media is compared to opiates -

the same language that was used to describe television and Nintendo.

And the drugs metaphor goes further back.

What do you think was described as the “marijuana of the nursery”

which, by the middle of the 20th Century,

had got people so worried about their addictiveness

that there were bestsellers about the harm they were doing young people,

Novels were silly, novels were enervating,

novels were the worst form of mental food,

novels were narcotic, novels were addictive.

This is Ankhi Mukherjee from the University of Oxford

and she's talking about a time when lots of people were genuinely worried

You had reviewers of children's literature writing in journals saying

it's terrible for children to be given books.

It was feared they would become addicted.

who has written extensively about this phenomenon.

And pretty much in the same way that we see the social media today

being responsible for uncivil behaviour and for a variety of sins,

the novel was the target of that kind of criticism.

You can find novels described as evil, as a vice,

And yet today, if anything, people are worried that young people

Whether it's radio, telephones, comic books or novels,

that media, for example, that 20 years ago

were really, really the object of concern,

then all of a sudden we don't hear very much about it.

I think something that's helpful for thinking about media panics

is the Gartner Hype Cycle, developed by a US company

and used to describe the way technologies are adopted by society.

According to this theory, a new technology

often has a moment of enthusiasm and high expectations,

when it seems like it might be the solution to everything.

It's being called “The Twitter Revolution”.

This is then followed by a crash - a period of disillusionment

and scepticism, before both hype and fear level off

while the concerns about each particular media might fade,

One straightforward explanation for media panics

is that adults have a natural parental concern for the young,

not remembering - because they were children at the time -

that the generation before had similar worries about them.

Another possible explanation is something called

This is how we can have no problem reconciling our own pretty benign

experiences with a media technology with a belief that it will cause

There's a very negative impoverished view of what human beings are

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A brief history of media panics | BBC Ideas

phenomenon

genuinely

debate

panic