In television, chiefly in shows aimed at kids, anyone getting a piece of shiny new consumer technology will do one of three things:
- Become obsessed with it, to the exclusion of everything else;
- Become dependent on it (and helpless when it breaks), or
- Become insufferable about it, until someone else gets an even cooler model.
What makes this often laughable is that between the lag times in producing TV episodes (especially animated children's
edutainment shows) and the lag time in writers discovering new trends and technology, the "cool new toy" is often
quaintly dated.
When this technology is used by an entire society, it becomes
Ludd Was Right.
Examples:
- This is parodied in South Park when Cartman gets a brand new Trapper Keeper that attempts to take over the world a la Terminator SDI.
- South Park also has three straight examples: when the kids become obsessed with the Okama Gamesphere to the point of destroying an Ancient Conspiracy just to recover their Gamesphere, when Kenny plays his PSP to death and ends up using his game to command the Legions of Heaven, and when Cartman starts fooling around with space-time because he can't wait until the Nintendo Wii is launched. And there was Cartman's Trapper Keeper, which took over the world and had to be stopped via Time Travel.
- The Brave Little Toaster has a literal example: The new appliances the Master has are basically living embodiments of the less than wholesome consumer culture of the 80's. They're also aversions-the whole reason why they tried to off the protagonists is that they were the prime candidates to go to college with the Master, rather then them.
- Some sects of the Adeptus Mechanicus Warhammer 40000 believe this, but it's not universal.
