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It's important to remember: not every website is 4chan. "There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
— Dick Cavett, mocking the TV violence debate
"Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet'. They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans over a cup of tea."
— Douglas Adams
There's always going to be The New Rock And Roll, that new fad or thing that causes whippersnappers to act all crazy and wild like they've all gone bonkers. Typically, this is a fringe phenomenon, and political and religious radicals will be bewailing the development while the media just reports on it.
At other times, though, the negative press goes far beyond basic opinions and phenomena that we can document on camera. Speculation goes on that devious things are afoot. When this goes too far, a reporter is at risk of spouting "New media are evil!" Otherwise-rational people faced with uncertainty about what the New Media is actually like decide that, just to be safe, or to grab some attention, they should go with the most inflammatory, headline-grabbing description they can come up with.
The motivation to demonize a medium can go much deeper than the desire of the media itself to make headlines. In our giant, pan-corporate world, there's a good chance that some news stations are owned by a guy who owns a major recording label. All of a sudden HQ's interest in stories about devious pirating activities becomes quite noticeable. To an audience generally uninformed about what the New Media is like to begin with, whether or not the story is true is irrelevant: the ring of truth is what becomes important.
Bear in mind that the impression given can largely be due to ignorance, the Cowboy Bebop At His Computer misstep taken by someone who is already predisposed to distrust this " Cowboy Bebop" character in the first place.
Take the Internet as an example; though it has come to dominate our lives today, a decade ago it was much less well-known in the mainstream. People taking up professions in the media industry as a career and most of the people involved today still don't have a full grasp on what the Internet is, so when the assumption is that Its A Small Net After All, all of a sudden every little instance of graphic pornography or 4chan vandalism ends up speaking for the Internet as a whole. New Media Are Evil decreases a great deal once the industry and society have adjusted to major technological advances and sees them as the norm. In other words, when the Medium stops being New, it stops being Evil.
This is by no means limited to the Internet, although the sheer density of information we receive today can make it seem that way. Almost every new medium of communication or expression that has appeared since the dawn of history has been accompanied by doomsayers and critics who have confidently predicted that it would bring about The End Of The World As We Know It by corrupting the youth, weakening the brain, or polluting our precious bodily fluids.
Sometimes the doomsaying has a kernel of truth. New media do change old media, sometimes for a net loss of quality in art or information. Most often, though, the new medium allows a new freedom from the old medium that makes for more opportunity.
See also Murder Dot Com, Everything Is Online, There Should Be A Law, TV Never Lies, and You Can Panic Now. The opposite usually ends with Old Media Playing Catch Up. When new media snarkers turn their wits on the old boys club, we see Old Media Are Evil.
Non-fictional examples:
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Ancient Times
- According to accounts recorded by his student Plato, Socrates was hostile toward writing (which, while not exactly new in his time, was still the latest medium to come down the pike). Essentially, Socrates claimed that putting an idea down in written form "killed" it by depriving it of a mind in which to "live", making it worthless. His argument can be found in a dialogue
 in The Phaedrus. This, of course, makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
- Incredibly, some still believe this today, which is why it is illegal to write down (or at least, make publicly available) the lyrics of the Black Metal band Gorgoroth.
- Something similar, though not quite as old: The Jewish Torah, according to tradition, had two parts to it, the Written and Oral Torah. The Written Torah is what we know as the Bible, whereas the Oral Torah eventually became the Mishnah and Talmud. For many centuries there was a strong desire to keep the oral Torah... well, oral. The point was that people were meant to memorize it and so keep it on the tips of their fingers. Writing was well and good for the general tenets, but not the specific details. However, it was recognized that the whole memorization thing wasn't going very well, so the Mishnah (and later, its expansion the Talmud) was formalized in writing in around 200 AD.
- An Egyptian Pharoah protested that the ability to write things down would inevitably result in his subjects' memories atrophying from disuse.
- Irony factor: How do we know these people were opposed to writing? Because someone wrote it down...
Medieval Europe
- Some Catholic theologians railed against the printing press, declaring it a creation of the devil, mostly because its most popular uses as it grew widespread both undercut the Church's authority: the mass production of The Bible in the local language instead of Latin (which threatened the Church monopoly on its interpretation due to the inclusion of commentary not exactly favorable to Church interests), and the distribution of the works of Luther and other Protestant reformers (which threatened the Church, period).
- To be fair, there were extant vernacular copies of The Bible for centuries before the the Reformation period. These saw limited use due to the illiteracy of most people at the time, even in their own languages, and the rarity of books meant many couldn't afford them anyway.
- It may come as a surprise, but musical harmony in the most familiar sense (also called "polyphony") is a relatively recent invention, dating back only to the middle ages. It was, of course, immediately viewed by some as fundamentally immoral, and on those grounds Pope John XXII banned polyphonal music in 1322 — by some accounts simply from liturgical use, by other accounts entirely. Later, after it stopped being new, another pope overturned the ban.
1800's-1900's Turn-of-the-Century
- The invention of the telephone not only prompted screeds bemoaning the impending death of literacy (because no one would need to write letters anymore), it also prompted widespread panic among law enforcement agencies, who realized that it allowed criminal gangs to conspire and plan crimes without having to meet in person, from the privacy of their own homes. According to some accounts, there were actually a few abortive attempts to outlaw the telephone for this reason (sound familiar?); instead, cooler minds prevailed, and wiretapping was developed instead.
- "The Hacker Crackdown", by Bruce Sterling, goes into great detail about turn-of-the-century anxieties about what the telephone meant for society, and draws a parallel with the early online networks.
- In the film Kinsey, Alfred Kinsey, Sr preaches that it promotes lust, allowing a girl to hear the voice of her suitor on the pillow next to her.
- Piano rolls — long scroll-like rolls of paper coded with holes in them for use in player pianos — were the first medium for cheaply making mass-produced "recordings" of music. At the time they were invented, the music industry was composed solely of publishers of sheet music. Predictably, these publishers saw the sales of pre-recorded performances as a major threat to their income, and lobbied Congress to not only ban piano rolls and player pianos, but to pass a law requiring any new system for music reproduction be subject to a veto from a collective association made up of all the music publishers. Congress didn't give in to their demands and instead created the "mechanical license" system. But not before the 19th-century equivalent of the RIAA trotted John Phillip Sousa before Congress to declare apocalyptically:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
- Radio: It didn't matter that some European governments strictly regulated their own radio stations (the Irish government banned jazz, with a ludicrously broad definition of what "jazz" was) when Radio Luxembourg could broadcast sinful music all across Europe.
- Also, early BBC announcers couldn't read out the result of sport events until about 7 p.m. in order not to hurt sales of evening newspapers.
- Some representatives of the recording industry have accused AM/FM radio of taking money out of their executives' pockets... in the first decade of the 21st century.
Close 1800's-1900's Turn-of-the-Century
1945- 1979
- The (re-)introduction of television after the end of World War Two prompted numerous pronouncements (both sober and wild-eyed) of its expected deleterious effects on society. One (probably tongue-in-cheek) example can be found in Stan Freberg's 1957 song "Tele-Vee-Shun".
- Hollywood's reaction to television was a panic attack that would have made Jack Thompson proud, all but blaming TV for the fall of the studio system — something that had been in progress for years due to mismanagement. After the US government won a huge antitrust suit against the studios in 1948, the major studios dumped huge amounts of their libraries to TV syndication companies, deciding they were of little value otherwise (the VCR was still 30 years away). Worse yet, one of the now-liberated theater chains, United Paramount Theaters, merged with ABC in 1953. Paramount smarted over all of this for years, and even had a hand in (trying to) kill the Du Mont network — which just ended up creating Metromedia, the precursor to FOX. Anyway, by the 1960s, all of the majors, even once-mighty MGM, had TV production facilities, except Paramount. They were finally forced into it by new owners Gulf+Western in 1968, after G+W bought Desilu from Lucille Ball. (The minors never had a problem with TV, since they didn't own theaters, and Columbia Pictures in particular jumped in head-first way back in 1951.)
- In a 1950s Superman film serial Lex Luthor has a television station.
- FCC chairman Newton Minow's 1961 "Vast Wasteland" speech really wasn't all that important in the long run, was probably a decade too late to have the maximum impact, and unfair: you can take any medium and make it look bad by emphasizing the more vulgar output. Plus, Minow's point was to remind TV broadcasters of their duty to the public, not a blanket condemnation of all television. Earlier in the speech he even said "When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better," and even admitted to be being a fan of The Twilight Zone. So why was it considered such a landmark speech? Because the print media was terrified of TV taking their audience away, so naturally they considered a government official delivering a Take That to television to be a Crowning Moment Of Awesome, and gave the speech maximum exposure.
- The famous anti-comic-book screed The Seduction of the Innocent featured as its last chapter an out-of-left-field denouncement of the evils of television.
- Novels were blamed for corrupting the youth — e.g., suggesting to young women that eloping with mysterious strangers was a good idea.
- In their defense, these people might have been on to something. After all, look at what Twilight does to people.
1980-Present
- As early as 1980 or so, Saturday Night Live parodied the paranoia that the recording industry demonstrates any time something new appears that consumers might spend money on besides records with a short film (allegedly funded by the industry) that demonized video games to a ridiculous degree. "Why spend eight dollars playing Pac Man when you can buy this Juice Newton album instead?"
- TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
- According to this story published in Variety magazine in March 2009, London-based media research company Screen Digest has calmly announced that free online TV (both pirated and ad-supported legal) is the single greatest threat to broadcast media.
- In her Nobel lecture, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing calmly implied that the almost instant arrival of the Internet (in historical terms) has fatally wounded writing and literature.
- This also extends to the New Media itself, when attempts to commercialize it are effectively resisted by its users, such as commercial pop-ups being countered by pop-up blockers and other software that cleans ads from web pages. Various industry groups are constantly hand-wringing about how this is "theft of service" and how it will bring about the death of the Internet. Because, as we all know, the Internet was built on the rock-solid foundation of advertisement before those pie-in-the-sky scientists and academics got their hands on it.
- And plenty of people have figured out that there are ways to make money over the web — by offering, y'know, actual content and merchandise instead of just advertising crap nobody wants. Still others run websites on hosting services that they actually pay for with real money from their day jobs, or just run ads that don't, well, suck.
- "The internet is Satan's domain!" — posted, of course, by someone on the internet.
- Due to problems associated with abuse of certain applications of cell phones, some school districts have banned them entirely.
- Wiley Miller, artist of the newspaper comic Non Sequitur, has gone on record about his belief that the Internet is ruining society, and he's taken several potshots at it in the comic. He has particular vitriol for webcomics. You have to wonder if he's even aware that you can read his comic online.
- Wikipedia, anyone?
- Conservatives, nativists, and religious radicals believe all anime is evil, manga to a lesser extent.
- Most of those finds are actually parodies.
- In early November 2009, author John Grisham not only predicted the end of bookstores and the complete disappearance of printed books due to the Kindle and other ebook technologies, but confidently declared that they would also make it harder for new authors to get published because of the changes they will also make to the economics of publishing.
Fictional examples:
Live Action TV
- Non-Fiction TV example: Buzz Bissinger's rant against Will Leitch (creator of the extremely popular sports blog Deadspin) during a live telecast of Costas Now. Totally unscripted, Bissinger reinforced basically everything in this (and many other) tropes.
- Thanks to being Ripped From The Headlines, a number of Law And Order stories share this flavor.
- This KTTV "Fox 11 News" "special report" purports to reveal the activities of a gang of "hackers on steroids" called Anonymous who destroy the lives of MySpace users, make death threats, and threaten to blow up stadiums. In fact, the "anonymous" in question is simply the default login to most Imageboards (the so-called "secret websites" and "underground hacker sites"). The "report" includes a random clip of a truck blowing up, apparently as a "demonstration" and a signal that You Can Panic Now. The "anonymous insider" is clearly in on the gag; note use of 4chan Catch Phrases like "Anonymous does not forgive". The mention of "like a real-life video game" earns extra New Media Are Evil points — such are the things that happen when a local news station doesn't know what they're getting into.
- And it's probably enough just to say this: Oh dear lord, the "Special Reports" on the night of Grand Theft Auto 4's release...
- The British Sun Newspaper (evidently worried that it was failing to meet its Paedo Hunt quota) ran a report on the satirical "Child Beauty Pageants" site that you can find on the in-game internet, which automatically redirect you to the FBI homepage and give you a four-star wanted rating. Apparently, including this was sick (and possibly wrong), and it would inevitably lead to people looking at these sites in real life.
- CSI Miami had an episode ("Cyber-lebrity") where a girl's entire life seems ruined because of a photo (not even showing nudity) of her posted on the Internet. To the point where people are trying to kill her. Then they go after Horatio, uncovering confidential information within minutes, because Its A Small Net After All. And having Flashmobs show up with a speed and fanatical interest over said girl that, in real life, wouldn't be seen if Britney Spears was french kissing Lindsay Lohan buck naked on top of a circus trapeze in the middle of Times Square with dancing leprechauns doing the macarena in time to music supplied to the Rolling Stones. At noon on a weekday.
- CSI New York had an episode where Reed, a blogger, tried to get Mac to give information on the Taxicab Killer. Mac refuses, so Reed proceeds to make something up. This whips up hysteria enough that three cabbies murder some random cabbie that they suspect to be the killer, except he was a cop. Considering that bloggers like Charles Johnson made their bones exposing malfeasance in old media, this is Anvilicious with a corrupt anvil. And just to drive it home even further, he's the next victim, or is he? It should be noted that Reed's original role in the series was as Mac's long-lost stepson, so there's definitely other tropes at play here. Still, there's probably a bit of new media hatin' in the mix.
- It also features a subversion: In "Down The Rabbit Hole", the team discovers that a Psycho For Hire is using Second Life too find info on her targets. She doesn't conform to the "Internet Stalker" archetype at all, and it's made quite clear she doesn't care for the game as anything more then a weapon (as revealed in a Nightmare Fuel Unleaded sequence where she uses a virus to crash her own server). Plus, it's revealed that Ross is an avid player.
- Similarly, Law And Order Special Victims Unit had an episode where the killer stalked and become obsessed with his victim on an obvious Second Life rip-off. The crucial clue to finding his kidnapping victim was to find the cabin he built for her in-game, in a location identical to the real-world cabin he built to keep his targets in. That's right, the guy modeled a lake and the attending geography so carefully, and placed his model cabin (also scrupulously accurate to the real world version) exactly where it was in real life, and on top of that, the Second Life rip-off had such a perfect lighting engine that the detectives found the cabin by dawning the virtual sun and then seeing how the shadows fell and oh my God
- In another episode, a kid claimed to have run over and then murdered a woman in a red dress because she looked like a prostitute out of a suspiciously GTA-esque video game, to the point where he was loudly describing the murder on the witness stand while his thumbs were furiously moving around in his lap and supposed mimicking the buttons one would push in the game. Inverted, because the A.D.A. saw right through his bullshit.
- Subverted to an extent, however, in an episode where a mentally-challenged teenager is suspected of killing one of his foster sisters as a result of his fascination with a fantasy role-play computer game, with some elements of the crime scene reflecting his interest in the game. The detectives rule him out, however, because he identified with the hero character, not any of the villains; he was acting out his interest in the game to try and protect her, not to harm her.
- Parodied in The IT Crowd, where an incredibly over-the-top spoof of the "you wouldn't steal a blank" anti-piracy PSA is shown when the characters are sitting down to watch a film.
- The Italian crime series Turbo (a ripoff of Commissar Rex, basically) had an infamous episode where a psychically disturbed man was accused of a murder, while the real culprits were some boys addicted to a "forbidden game" which had Doom 's cover, Quake II footage with a red filter, and was named DUUM II (spelled exactly this way). Complete with: a psychotherapist speaking about the connection between video games and violence from adolescents, the boys yelling "Blood, blood..." "I must kill them at any cost!" while playing, and one of them attacking the main character with an axe, screaming "Final Fiiight!". Yeah.
- Commissar Rex inspired a rip-off?
- Italian dog who helps his detective owner solve crimes. Uh huh, completely original.
- To be fair, I remember watching that episode and part of the reason why the game created the killers going against anything — even the eccentric homeless guy the dog likes — was because it was intended that way. Oh yes, through the power of some psychological method involving bright symbols, they were able to control people subliminally. Yeah. Then again, it has been a while since I've seen it, so I could be wrong on this.
- The infamous "Bloggers" sketch on The Daily Show, in which Stephen Colbert reveals increasingly sordid details about his own life in order to keep attack bloggers from getting the scoop. For a start, his real name is Ted Hitler, (Direct Grandson), he smuggled drugs in college and he drunkenly killed and ate a panda....
- Baseball in the fifties suffered huge attendance declines, and there was a real fear that it was being threatened by the invention of television. (Somehow this always gets left out those nostalgic books about how great baseball was in the golden fifties.) Commissioner Ford Frick predicted that baseball would be out of business in ten years if it could not gain control of indiscriminate broadcasting. In reality, though, the sport had become out of sync with population centers, and fans were turned off by the decade-long domination by New York teams that so enthralled sportswriters. Once teams moved to the West Coast and middle America and the Yankees' fifties-early-sixties dynasty collapsed, attendance rebounded, a trend that continues to this day.
- In some ways, league baseball itself had been subject to this in its early days — the prevalence of game fixing, the scandalous behavior of some well-known players (several of whom were notorious brawlers and drunks) and the rowdy crowds at parks (umpires occasionally required police escort to and from the park to protect them from fans) led to many newspapers decrying the sport, eventually culminating in a big move to clean up the game's image following the "Black Sox" scandal in 1919, in which the World Series was fixed.
- NCIS occasionally subverts this with Timothy "Elf Lord" McGee, who's up on video game culture and plays an MMORPG. Although he is mocked for this, it has come in useful more than once. At one point (when his "Elf Lord" status is first revealed), the murder mystery revolved around an MMO (thus adding a straight example to the subversion), and in another case, he was able to identify the model of the suspect's car, based off of a kid telling him it was a Kuruma (the GTA equivalent). A recent episode involves a narcissistic killer with a theatrical bent communicating through a thinly veiled YouTube Fictional Counterpart — but when the fake YouTube is mentioned, all the characters (except, naturally, Gibbs) are familiar with it and consider it more or less harmless. "Lonelygirl15?" "Evolution of Dance?" "Numa Numa kid?" Before we even get to see the cryptic killer video, there's a good bit where it's just Abby dancing along with Dragostea Din Tei...
- Touched By An Angel tackled the Internet in "Pandora's Box", but to its credit subverted the trope. After the family-of-the-week's daughter was rescued from an online predator, Monica explained that the Internet isn't inherently bad and can (and should) be used for good instead of evil.
- Played straight in the episode "Virtual Reality" where video games are apparently tools of Satan that makes children do horrible things and any form of violent media will turn any good student into a horrible horrible person who views the world in points and crosshairs on bums and police officers. They even bring in the typical pseudo-science and so-called experts to try and convince everyone that violent games lead to violent actions in real life. The only intelligent thing said in the episode was a line about how people just try to blame video games for bad things, like Columbine, when they should consider that the people who commited said crime are already "whacked up" in the first place. What's strange though is that it tries to tell parents to be responsible and make sure they know what their kids are playing, but it plays up the effects of the violent games so much it becomes redundant and even takes the blame off the people who commited said crimes and places it instead on a video game. Meaning your sins are forgiven because you've placed them on the game instead, you're not responsible for your actions at all. Take into account this is a show about angels, isn't scapegoating blasphemous?
- Depends on your religion. The Bible has instructions for an actual scapegoating ritual in the Old Testament (Leviticus), although modern thought is that the word means something else in context and shouldn't actually be translated as "scapegoat".
- A debate similar to the VCR incident cited under Digital Piracy Is Evil is now going on over ebooks — most notably Amazon's Kindle, which is selling like there's no tomorrow. Is this the end of printed books? Ask anyone who was around in the '50s and worried that television would be the death of movies what they think.
- The funny thing is, This troper's grandma was around in the 50s, and loves her eBookwise. Mainly because carrying print versions of the sheer amount she reads would be impractical.
- Ax can tell us why books aren't going to just disappear anytime soon.
- The French cop show Engrenages aka Spiral had a murder-of-the-week in its second season in which a stereotypical alienated teen boy murdered his slightly older cyber-girlfriend after they met in real life and she rejected him for being too young, then killed himself. However, the general tone of the ep didn't condemn the internet so much as his parents for not noticing how screwed-up he was.
Comic Books/Manga
- XXXHolic has a more sympathetic/realistic example of this trope: one of Yuuko's customers is a housewife who is spending all of her time on the internet, to the exclusion of everything else, including her family, and Yuuko ends up smashing her computer... though she notes that it was all up to the housewife; that she should do what she wants to do, not what her family want her to do.
- This isn't the first time CLAMP has taken a potshot at the Internet; in Chobits, one of the many Aesops is how artificial communication and simulation is destroying society. Of course, then CLAMP gets distracted by the cute robot-girl and the point kinda peters out.
- A Scooby Doo comic once used as villains a gang of counterfeiters who were staging the haunted house masquerade to cover for their true operation... making counterfeit cassette recordings of popular music bands, which they would then supply to unscrupulous music stores. Apparently, the people who bought them didn't realize that they could make their own copies a lot cheaper.
Newspaper Comics
- The Dick Tracy newspaper comic did a story arc where they essentially shilled for the RIAA, portraying people who pirate movies and music as not only being literal thieves (they beat up guards and steal stuff out of warehouses so they can... make bootleg copies of it), but equivalent to drug dealers, including making ridiculous, over-the-top new villain characters in the style of characters like Babyface to represent internet piracy. It even included panic-mongering in the form of notes to parents that "If your kids download music, you can pay the price!" with an image of a cop car zooming up to a house with its siren running, presumably so the cops can kick in the door and slam the parents to the floor, handcuffing them and hauling them right to jail because their daughter downloaded "Slave 4 U". (Of course, all indications are that the guy writing these comics is completely and totally insane at this point, but being the RIAA's henchgoon is just a new twist.)
- In Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin's dad refuses to buy a VCR because "It's bad enough we have a TV."
- Of course, that probably has more to do with Calvin's taste in programming and tendency to watch at all hours than any inherent hate of the medium itself.
- In one of his notes, Watterson himself called TV "the favorite drug of the 20th Century".
- In the second Jurassic Park novel, one of the characters comment on how the Internet is the doom of all civilization, because it will "make everyone have the way of thinking about everything and force conformity." ....ahahahahaha.
- An older example: in Roald Dahl's original novel of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, the song sung by the Oompa-Loompas after Mike Teevee is shrunk denounces television in favour of reading. This is dated and absurd enough the newest movie version of the novel changes his obsession to videogames (particularly first-person shooters), even though it makes his name and (supposedly) smartaleckiness a little out of place.
- Roald Dahl hated TV. With a burning passion. The villainous parents in Matilda spend all their time watching TV and hate books. Enough said.
- This gets wierd in the lattest film however, because they use a fairly close adaption of Roald Dahl's original song, meaning there is a "TV is evil" message in a 2005 film...
The most important thing that we've ever learned
The most important thing we've learned as far as children are concerned
Is never, never let them near the television set
Or better still just don't install the idiotic thing at all
- Much of Fahrenheit 451 was just Ray Bradbury ranting about how television (and radios with headphones?) would dumb Americans down, destroy literature, ruin marriages, cause violence, and ultimately kill everyone because nobody took war seriously. Nevermind that Bradbury wrote many adaptations of his own stories for TV shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone...
- American Gods: The God of the Internet and the Television Goddess while no more evil than the old gods were callow and vapid in comparison.
- One of Asimov's stories mentions "dreamies" — direct neural interface movies. A government official says pornographic dreamies are the one type of pornography which is the worst for the "moral fiber of the nation". In The End of Eternity, dreamies are considered a technology which cannot be allowed to exist — just like nuclear wars (or replicators).
- The Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Gallifrey Chronicles features a vignette set in The Eighties, in which an alien intelligence introduces a device that's like a mobile phone, but much smaller, strangely streamlined, and with a screen, to a school playground. The children become fascinated, and then antisocial and withdrawn, as the alien radiation brainwashes them. They also start, somehow, talking in a way that skips vowels, and uses numbers instead of homonymous words. Yes, the texting generation is an evil alien plot!
Video Games
- City Of Villains parodies this with the Television contact, where the player (as a supervillain) is influenced into destroying books and fighting another contact who happens to be a sentient Radio, entirely so that everyone will have to Watch More Television.
- Of course, rather earlier, you can get missions from the Radio contact where you go around blasting TV stations, so really it's got the whole spectrum covered.
- This seems to be a pretty big plot point in Mother 3, as it concerns an evil dictatorship slowly transforming a quiet rural culture into a full-fledged technological cityscape. Most blatant are the "Happiness Boxes", which look like television sets or computer monitors, and anyone that doesn't own one has their house struck by lightning multiple times. Naturally Lucas, being the Only Sane Man in this situation, is the only one that doesn't have one.
- Alec and Nippolyte were without "Happy Boxes" as well, and their houses were completely vaporized. For those of you thinking the lightning's unnatural, you're absolutely right: there's a tower with a massive lightning gun blasting every place that refuses to stock a Happy Box. Lucas' house is notorious for surviving multiple shots, given his insistence on not having one of those devices.
- It can however be argued that the villagers' naivety in trying to reset the entire history of their world and reverting to luddism was what allowed Fassad to wreak such havoc in the first place. Porky himself calls them on it during the endgame. After all, one of the heroes of Earth Bound was a scientist. Also, New Pork City was hardly a cityscape; it was largely junk and cardboard, the dream empire of a little boy.
- Persona 4, wherein television and media coverage are causing the creation of monsters and an alternate reality born from the human subconscious. Ironic though, as it is a video-game.
- This doesn't really count. The idea is actually much more about societal pressures, denial, rumors, etc. The television is only used because it's the most widely available news source and because the story is loosely based on a Japanese urban legend. Actually, if one has played Persona 2, one could argue that the Midnight Channel probably came into existence because of that urban legend.
- Not to mention that the TV is also the only method the characters have of stopping the assorted monsters and killers; had the serial killer who formed the main story arc chosen to claim his victims in some other way, the party wouldn't have been able to intervene. New Media caught the murderer!
- The real dig in this one is Void Quest, a dungeon modeled after.... 8-bit video games. The aspect of the game's Search For The Truth theme is about not confusing fantasy and reality and not using hollow, vicarious experiences to soothe the pain of an empty life, but... it's still a video game, making it a variety of twisted Aesops and just plain weird.
Western Animation
- A memorable episode of The Proud Family portrayed downloading songs from the Internet as being like drug addiction. Napster (or, as they called it, "E-Z-Jackster") is eeeeeeeevil.
- For some reason, it was like a drug and like The Matrix...
- Because there's a pirating site called Morpheus.
- Another Disney series, American Dragon Jake Long did an episode which rips into blogging: when Jake goes online and vents about his annoying teacher, every magical creature in the city immediately assumes he's putting out a public contract on the man's life, and the assassination attempts commence though that might be a more becareful what you wish for thing...
- In an episode of Jackie Chan Adventures, Uncle, who is not technology-savvy, embraces the internet for the the first time. After everything on the screen disappears, he concludes that the internet is evil and a creation of demons, and proceeds to literally "crash" Jade's laptop.
- Parodied/subverted by the song "Don't Download This Song" by Weird Al Yankovic, which in a deliberately overblown and tongue-in-cheek manner links downloading MP3s to all manner of criminal behavior and attempts to elicit sympathy for the poor recording artists who can't afford a new solid gold Humvee because of it. The video, animated in typical dream/nightmare style by Plympton, just makes it even more over the top.
- And the fact that it's available for download for free on Weird Al's MySpace page makes it even funnier!
- As a further smack-in-the-face, this was the only way to get the song for several months before the hardcopy album was released. Double irony.
- Mitch Benn takes the opposite tack with "Steal This Song".
- Steal This Album! by System of a Down.
- Actually, System of a Down don't have a problem with new media. There was a problem involving people downloading their songs before the album was released (I'm not sure how it exactly happened), so SOAD complained by releasing Steal This Album!. They have gone on record saying that they're fine with people downloading their songs, providing they download the songs after the album's been released. So... not a straight example after all.
Politics
- In a town hall meeting in Merrimack, NH on 29 December 2007, then-Presidential candidate John McCain flat out declared his hatred of bloggers, as well as other alternative sources of news and information available to citizens, and did so in a way that makes it clear that he's not entirely up to speed on recent high-tech developments like cable TV. It probably comes as no surprise that he's also physically incapable of using a computer or sending an email after his torture.
- Also, disclosure laws and security concerns have a poor effect on the ability of many high-level politicians to use new technology. Bush gave up his personal email address in 2000
, and Obama is likely to abandon his Blackberry now that he's President-Elect. In this case, it's arguably the result of rational fears about the technology, but nobody has ever asked either to give up their telephone.
- Actually, he didn't have to. Mr. Obama was able to keep his (HEAVILY) modified Crackberry, and get a second phone for official business. The members of the US Senate and FBI agents are issues Blackberries for official business. And I can't blame Mr. Obama one iota for being loathe to part with his — this troper put in a decade's worth of cell phone tech support, and a Blackberry was one of the most durable, reliable things out there.
- In their defense, look how long it took for governor Sarah Palin to get her account hacked.
- Her Yahoo account. And it was "hacked" by someone resetting the password after answering her security questions, after Governor Palin gave an interview with all the personal information needed to do that on national TV. This is an example of an entirely different trope.
- McCain is currently an avid Twitterer.
- The Pentagon recently sent a red flag up about the possibilities for terrorists to conspire in plain sight on MMORPGs. Given that the entire scenario they presented was manufactured out of wholecloth and no such collaboration has ever been detected (or even suspected before now), it seems pretty obvious that this is another "oh my god! bad people can talk together!" panic similar to the one raised over the telephone a century and a half ago.
- Similarly, a U.S. Army report released in late October 2008 suggested Twitter could be used by terrorists to coordinate attacks. Again, there was no evidence that such a thing was happening, simply that the Army had discovered a new medium of communication and determined that it did not magically prevent terrorists from using it.
- Because there's no better way to plan a terrorist attack than on a public blog with severe length limits! As opposed to, say, encrypted emails.
- Of course, each time such a report is released, geeks around the world cry out "Stop giving them ideas, you morons!"
- The US Marine Corps (which is a division of the Navy) just banned social networking sites.
- To be entirely fair this has more to do with social network sites being notoriously vulnerable to trojans and viruses, which the military has a very good reason to want to keep out. It's no more ridiculous than most communications security measures.
- The actual technological revolution that cell phones has caused in terrorism and guerilla warfare seems to be ignored.
- Pieter De Crem, the Belgian Defense Minister, has made it known to the Belgian Parliament that blogging is a "dangerous phenomenon" that "exceeds mud-slinging," which is why he got a New York-based blogger fired from her job as a bartender. Her crime? Blogging about De Crem and his aides getting plastered in her bar. On taxpayer's money.
- Social networking siteswill destroy kids' brains.
- The French president is not allowed to use a Blackberry for reasons of national security. This is somewhat justified, since all communication takes a detour via the USA. And you don't want your presidential communication at the hands of a foreign government.
- Jan Marijnissen a retired Dutch politician has been very vocal about the supposed sorry state of journalism, it reached its peak when he was speaking at this tropers college and told the students that bloggers are parasites and that Twitter is only for losers and attention starved politicians.
New Media
- DLC (downloadable content) for PC and console games are being seen as pure evil by gamers, claiming that DLC content gives companies an excuse to half ass a game's development and then "finish" the rest via DLC or to purposely lock content on the game disc and force gamers to pay extra to unlock it. Others say that DLC allows developers to add extra content to a game after its release in order to keep the game fresh. The individual backlash usually depends on how the developer actually uses it. Just talking about DLC can brew a Flame War in some places.
New Media (are evil)
- Youtube Poop: Galadriel reveals to Frodo the horrifying future when Facebook will become like MySpace.
- Hulu's hilarious ad campaign features celebrities from NBC and Fox shows (Alex Baldwin, Seth MacFarlane, Eliza Dushku, and now Dennis Leary) admitting that television does in fact rot your brain, and that Hulu will rot it even more due to its convenience. They then admit that they are aliens who want to drink your liquefied brain mass.
Close New Media (are evil)
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