Behold the techno-panic timeline!
In Bad For You, coming on January 7th from Henry Holt, authors Kevin C. Pyle and Scott Cunningham expose the long-standing campaign against fun for what it really is: a bunch of anxious adults grasping at straws, ignoring scientific data, and blindly yearning for the good old days that never were.
In this handy graphic, they point out the repeated panics we’ve had over new technology, from the printing press to books to telephones and everything in between and around. It turns out we’re really super into blaming new things for existing problems!
If only we could invent some kind of device that would impart information from previous years and eras, as a way to…read history…in hopes of not, um, not…
No, wait, it’ll come to us….
Click the image to see the full size version.
I’m sure they will say the same of telepathy in 2050!
You know, I get that sometimes people are reactionary, but didn’t the television lead to a breakdown of sorts when it came to family norms? Last time I looked, TV wasn’t a wellspring of intelligent content, yet it continues to be a centerpiece of the industrialized world.
Ah, the Dungeons & Dragons panic is coming back to me now.
As well as the identical, later panic, over Vampire: The Masquerade.
Yes, we do love our panics.
There’s only one thing overlooked here: in one way or another, to one degree or another, ALL of those prognostications are spot-on! The fact that we’ve accepted, adapted and moved on (sometimes to our detriment as a species) doesn’t negate their truthiness….
It goes back even earlier. Socrates disapproved of writing on the grounds that it impaired memory and understanding of whatever was written down, and that it was indiscrimiate about who it reached.