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I hate the Internet!
-- Kate Monster, Avenue Q, "The Internet Is For Porn"
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV violence debate
So someone on the Internet caught your TV network rigging up explosions to make crash tests look more dangerous, or falsifying documents to support a point your newsmen were trying to make. Naturally, you're going to be resentful -- thanks to the power of the Internet, every time you screw up, your mistake will get halfway around the world before your explanation can get its pants on. Nor is there a secure way to send your screwups down the memory hole for good.
Solution? New Media Are Evil. Make those rubes who don't know much about computers or the Internet think that the Internet is the Root Of All Evil. Show them all the worst parts of it, like the losers, pervs, and precociously sexualized kids on Myspace, or the neo-Nazi websites, or the endless, endless pornography. And don't just write TV-show scripts about the evil of the Internet, either -- tell your audience on the news, every night.
Since the early 1990's, a disproportionate number of news items about the Internet and its various uses have been either condescension and belittlement, or paranoid scare stories. Incidentally, they do the same thing with video games, too, but there it's all about keeping a profit margin. If you tell scary stories, people want to pay attention to you, and you sell more advertising space. But if your newspaper, TV news broadcast, or cable news network can both sell advertising space and scare the audience away from your online competition? Dingdingding! Jackpot!
Related to this is the paranoia and hatred the "traditional" media often express toward any technology that gives consumers more control over the content they watch or listen to than the media providers want them to have. This was most clearly and blatantly expressed in the now-infamous 2002 Cableworld interview with then-Turner Television CEO Jamie Kellner, in which he outright declared that using a Tivo was theft, and that television viewers have an "implicit contract" with broadcasters that obligates them to watch commercials. And only when pressed by the interviewer did Kellner grudgingly allow that it might be okay to go to the bathroom during commercials.
This is also related to a much larger pattern, wherein New Media is The New Rock And Roll.
See also Murder Dot Com, There Should Be A Law, TV Never Lies, and You Can Panic Now. The opposite usually ends with Old Media Playing Catch Up.
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 is actually the modern manifestation of a classic tactic. 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?"
- Similarly, the film and television industry reacted with violent hostility when VCR technology was introduced, claiming that if consumers were allowed to record whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, movies were inevitably doomed, and television wouldn't be far behind. Which, as we all know, is precisely what happened after the famous "Betamax lawsuit" was resolved in the VCR's favor. Jack Valenti, of the Motion Picture Association of America, actually referred to the VCR as "the Boston Strangler of the movie industry."
- This Fox 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.
- Speaking of Fox News, in late January 2008 there was an uproar over a lesbian sex scene in the game Mass Effect. The Fox News article tended to... overstate... the content of the scene in question, and the context in which it occurs, and claimed that it was full-frontal (it's not) and voluntarily dictated by the player. One of Fox's guest commentators, Cooper Lawrence, made the mistake of doing this while having a new book recently released. Gamers showed her why that was a mistake by sending its Amazon.com rating screaming into the pits of damnation. In less than a week, Lawrence issued an apology and admitted that she had never actually seen the game and had done no research, instead relying solely on rumor.
- 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...
- 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.
- While on fire.
- With an alien spaceship hovering overhead.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Comic Books/Manga
- One of the cases in XXXholic involves a housewife whose addiction to the Internet will "destroy her family." To help save her from the terrible Interwebz, Witch Yuuko smashes her computer with a baseball bat. Note, however, that Yuko points out that living most of her life on the 'net was a perfectly viable option.
- 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.
- 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 2 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.)
Film
- The 1995 Sandra Bullock movie The Net was largely composed of hysterical hand-wringing over how easy computers and the Internet supposedly make it for one's identity to be "deleted" by "hackers". Apparently, it took place in a world where no one carries a driver's license.
- Thanks to Die Hard 4, we learn that using the internet, you can shut down the world!
- Videodrome takes this trope to its logical conclusion.
Literature
- 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.
- A debate similar to the VCR incident above 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.
- Word Of God has it that this is the actual message of Fahrenheit 451.
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.
- In Television's defense, the Radio was evil. And those video games and school books only made you worse. It's true, Television said it.
New Media
- 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.
- As a sidenote, the one thing that every single political website--from Daily Kos to Free Republic--has is a seething hatred for MSM, or the Mainstream Media.
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.
- 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.
Music
- 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!
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