new technologies, new scapegoats?
Sunday, August 30, 2009 by jayjay
Sunday, August 30, 2009 by jayjay
We’ve all heard how television is the evil entity which has been slowly eating away the morals of society and for decades the medium has faced scrutiny from the discourse of anti-television.
Television has been used as a scapegoat for promoting sex and violence in the younger audience and has been blamed for turning kids’ brains into mush. I guess it’s only expected that in the age of convergence when all forms of media are being transformed by new technologies and people are spending more of their time online, that we are to see new directions for such attitudes as well.
If we recall what Luke said in class about the moral panic regarding social network sites it was mentioned that too much of this was supposedly going to “infantilize” our brains, reverberating some of the old evils that television was blamed for in the past. Although new arguments s have been added into the scope of things, like the proliferation of online bullying, funnily enough these new reasons to be wary of social network sites have been counter argued in similar ways to that over television being the scapegoat for such worries like increasing violence.
It seems like maybe social network sites have provided another outlet for the public to voice concerns over the perils of activities associated with the younger generation. Various media like TV and movies have always been closely related to ill on-goings of teens and young adults. So is facebook being added to this list as a promoter of social illnesses? And is there a new anti-media discourse being formed in light of new media?
We’ve all heard how television is the evil entity which has been slowly eating away the morals of society and for decades the medium has faced scrutiny from the discourse of anti-television.
Television has been used as a scapegoat for promoting sex and violence in the younger audience and has been blamed for turning kids’ brains into mush. I guess it’s only expected that in the age of convergence when all forms of media are being transformed by new technologies and people are spending more of their time online, that we are to see new directions for such attitudes as well.
If we recall what Luke said in class about the moral panic regarding social network sites it was mentioned that too much of this was supposedly going to “infantilize” our brains, reverberating some of the old evils that television was blamed for in the past. Although new arguments s have been added into the scope of things, like the proliferation of online bullying, funnily enough these new reasons to be wary of social network sites have been counter argued in similar ways to that over television being the scapegoat for such worries like increasing violence.
It seems like maybe social network sites have provided another outlet for the public to voice concerns over the perils of activities associated with the younger generation. Various media like TV and movies have always been closely related to ill on-goings of teens and young adults. So is facebook being added to this list as a promoter of social illnesses? And is there a new anti-media discourse being formed in light of new media?