We never welcome new media with open arms, but with suspicion or trepidation. New media changes not just how we communicate, but often how we live. Sometimes it’s the content itself, like films or video games, that worries us; other times it is the technology behind it, especially after the creation of the atomic bomb. Yet we adapt, eventually accepting the media that once horrified us — and asking, in hindsight, how we managed without it.
These are humanity’s major media panics.
In the early 20th century, “Women were forbidden to use the phone,” recorded historian Michèle Martin. Women’s phone use was seen as a moral danger; they risked becoming “telephone-addicts,” using the device for endless gossip rather than serious communication — or doing housework. More broadly, people feared that telephones eroded communal life and weakened social bonds. Physicians expressed alarm over its effects on the human nervous system and the risk of infection from sharing the mouthpiece.
Author Lee Grieveson’s Policing Cinema shares early 20th century newspaper reports warning of the moral decay initiated by film. The Chicago Tribune reported that Nickelodeon audiences included “schoolgirls … who remained sometimes for two or three views … in short dresses,” sparking fears that cinema corrupted young women. A University College London thesis reported widespread moral concerns about early films: Many in the press viewed them as “sexually suggestive, or even incitements to criminal behaviour.”
Radio’s expansion helped create what became known as “mass society.” Concern focused on how radio homogenized and privatized leisure, reshaping domestic life. Gary Cross writes that it produced “passive and isolated audiences … reducing interactions” and fostered “commercialized youth leisure.” All leisure involved spending, which endures today. Radio was the first household technology to restructure social life, the precursor to countless devices now integrated into daily living.
Television became unprecedentedly popular in the 1950s. Viewers formed parasocial relationships with the characters they saw on-screen, organized their social lives around programs and spent money inordinately on the products advertised. Scholars like Neil Postman argued that TV affected practically every aspect of life, from politics to our cognition. In the United Kingdom, the term “telly addicts” described excessively devoted viewers.
Hysteria over the effects of TV hardly subsided until consumer Internet rose in the 1990s.
Anxieties about computers began long before they became the foundation of digital life. Early fears centered on automation, job loss and vast “databanks” that could erode privacy, amplified by books like Vance Packard’s The Naked Society and films like Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project. By the 1980s and 1990s, home computers provoked new worries: isolation, obsessive use and “computer junkies.” These were precursors to modern digital panics — each leap in computational power revives old mediaphobic concerns.
Players first reported Space Invaders obsession in 1982. Unlike earlier media scares, this one has morphed with each generation. 1980s: “arcade obsession” and “machine addiction;” 1990s: Mortal Kombat, Doom and school shootings; 2010s–2020s: competitive gaming and loot box gambling. It’s endured over 40 years, making it the most durable panic about any medium. Yet the American Psychiatric Association has not added a formal diagnosis for video gaming. Internet Gaming Disorder sits in a “needs more research” section.
Early concerns centered on health, particularly brain cancer, though these gave way to wider social anxieties about the replacement of face-to-face interaction. Users who experienced the fear of being without a phone were prescribed periodic digital detoxes. As recently as 2017, author Jean M. Twenge of The Atlantic claimed Millennials were “on the brink of a mental-health crisis.” There is no plausible evidence of this, though it would be unusual if such a preponderant and valuable piece of tech didn’t strike terror.
Public anxiety about AI surfaced when large language models became widely accessible and headlines warned of job losses and “civilization-ending” risks. An open letter demanding a pause on advanced AI systems drew over 30,000 signatures from leading figures. Yet AI saves lives: In medicine, it designs new proteins and speeds up drug discovery. The mismatch between dystopian rhetoric and tangible benefit makes AI the most exaggerated recent tech scare.
My AI colleague, ChatGPT, wrote this paragraph.
The Australian government’s ban has been the most radical response to scares over social media and its presumed — if unproven — harmful repercussions (e.g. misogyny, bullying, suicide). Several Western democracies, especially in Europe and Oceania, are actively considering or drafting comparable bans or strict age restrictions aimed specifically at social platforms. There is no plausible evidence that social media is deleterious, nor that bans have much effect — apart from inducing young people to discover ingenious workarounds.
Credits
Written by Ellis Cashmore
Edited by Kaitlyn Diana and Lee Thompson-Kolar
Produced by Lokendra Singh
Images courtesy of Shutterstock
[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture, now in its third edition.]