This quote isn’t talking about smartphones,
or even TV or computer games.
Answer?
It’s actually from 1936 and it’s talking about the radio.
And how about this?
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
how addictive they were.
We see today concern over social media,
before it was the internet, then we had video nasties,
television, radio, cinema…
Meet Kirsten Drotner, Professor of Media Studies
at the University of Southern Denmark...
How many did I get to?
...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
and is taken up in a big way,
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,
comparing it to drugs.
But it’s easy to forget that Pac-Man, Pinball and television
were described in the same way.
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”
because they were so addictive?
The answer?
Comic books
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,
official inquiries,
even public burnings.
OK, last quote...
As destructive as cocaine?
That would be the novel.
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
about people reading.
You had reviewers of children's literature writing in journals saying
this is terrible for children -
it's terrible for children to be given books.
It was feared they would become addicted.
And this is Frank Furedi,
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,
so too in the 18th Century
the novel was the target of that kind of criticism.
You can find novels described as evil, as a vice,
and blamed for violence.
And yet today, if anything, people are worried that young people
are not reading enough novels.
Whether it’s radio, telephones, comic books or novels,
we see a similar pattern.
There's a kind of historical amnesia -
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
and everyone basically calms down.
But with media panics,
while the concerns about each particular media might fade,
the overall state of anxiety continues
as something new fills the gap.
So why do media panics keep occurring?
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
the “third person effect”
which describes a tendency to believe
that other people will be more affected
by a media message than you are.
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
much greater harm to others.
There's a very negative impoverished view of what human beings are
in a lot of the discussion on the media.
They are really, really too stupid,
they're uneducated, they cannot deal with the complexities
of everyday life, and therefore they become pretty much the prisoners
of the media.
A final theory is to do with something social scientists call
“cultural capital”.
The idea is that along with economic capital and social capital,
one thing that establishes your position in society
is your knowledge about culture.
And this is especially true for those most often most concerned
about new media.
To middle class people who can't fall back on landed property,
they invest a lot in themselves in order to get on in society.
They invest a lot in education,
in operating according to the right cultural norms.
But when new types of media come along
it threatens their investment in these old forms of cultural capital,
so no wonder they react nervously.
It's also a precarious investment
because they live in a dynamic society,
and modern society - through the 18th Century and on -
is based on change.
"Meantime some big investors now are calling on Apple to help fight
what it considers an addiction to the iPhone..."
Currently there’s a debate going on about smartphones and social media
with some scientists arguing there’s evidence for harm,
while many others are unconvinced.
But while it makes sense to be cautious,
knowing the history of media panics should help give us some perspective.
I'm also a parent and I'm also a grandparent and I'm also concerned,
and I think it's fine to be concerned,
because it's a kind of indication that you take responsibility.
But I think there's a difference between being concerned
and panicking, because if you panic, you can't think.
We don’t know what effect
social media and smartphones will have long-term on our society,
but what we do know is that, as long as we keep inventing
new forms of media,
the cycle of panic is likely to continue.