Ignorance and fear have always been the two key ingredients thrown into the mix when something new comes along. People are fundamentally weary of change to the point of becoming irrational.
The fear always seems to come from an older generation that grew up one way and is opposed to that way ever changing.
Let’s look at the reaction to media through the past century to highlight this point.
I happen to love media in all its forms. That’s why (My name is Christopher Moshier and) I created a business called My Media Helper. The business welcomes and embraces all that falls under the umbrella of what we know and call media.
Did you know television was once thought to negatively invoke violent behavior in children and caused them great emotional damage? We can go back even farther than that! The same was also said for movies, radio, and even books. Technology around media may have changed in the past century, but the rhetoric behind the unknown hasn’t.
Let’s look at some attacks on media over the past century. They may seem silly to us now, but back then people were up in arms towards media that was overall harmless.
BOOKS and LITERATURE
There have been book burnings since the dawn of the written word.
What is considered the first book ban in the United States took place in 1637 in what is now known as Quincy, Massachusetts. Thomas Morton wrote his New English Canaan, which the Puritan government later outlawed because it was seen as a severe and heretical indictment of Puritan traditions and social hierarchies.
We can cite countless examples of book banning. What it comes down to with books and any media is your ideas don’t match with my ideas so we’re going to ban it. This will be a running theme with this article and the banning of media in general.
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RADIO
Can you imagine a time when the shaking of hips on television had to be censored? It happened with Elvis Presley, the king of Rock and Roll. Speaking of rock and roll during the birth of the genre in the early ’60s, the FCC began to ban certain songs that had to do with a range of topics that were considered indecent.
These topics varied from sexuality to violence, and the FCC frequently prohibited any songs that were thought to encourage, provoke, or openly reference these issues.
In the course of its forty-year existence, people have been terrified and offended by rock music because it is the sound of rebellion against authority, according to the book Anti-Rock: The Opposition of Rock n’Roll. The first book to describe the criticisms of rock is called Anti-Rock.
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MOVIES
The 1894 silent film Carmencita was subject to local self-censorship as a result of official complaints about film content dating back at least to what was likely the first appearance of a woman in a motion picture in the United States.
I wonder what those people would think of the 70s and 80s when pornographic movies and pornographic theaters were pretty popular. People having sex on film for others to watch.
Laws authorizing censorship of film in the United States began with an 1897 Maine statute prohibiting the exhibition of prizefight films; the state enacted the statute to prevent the exhibition of the 1897 heavyweight championship between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Other states followed Maine’s example.
In 1907, Chicago passed the nation’s first censorship law, empowering the police chief to review every motion picture before deciding whether it should be shown publicly. The following year, Detroit passed its own ordinance. After being upheld in a court case in 1909, other cities did the same.
By today’s standards, it seems absurd, yet this is the point I’m attempting to make in my essay.
The witch hunt that was the McCarthy hearings and blacklisting of Hollywood in 1947 is also a good insight into the attack on media and movies. In this case, I’ll offer up two interesting books to read.
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TELEVISION
George Gerbner was a professor of communications and the creator of the Cultivation Theory. This theory states that stories told by a culture determine the behavior and values of individuals.
Among other institutions, George Gerbner worked for Villanova University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University. George Gerbner started researching the “mean-world” phenomenon in the 1970s.
Through his “cultivation” paradigm, Gerbner hypothesized that people who watch a lot of television develop a pessimistic view of the world because television programming depicts considerably more violence than is actually present in it.
The research of Gerbner and his associates has shown, for example, that heavy television viewers exceed light viewers in their estimates of the chances of being involved in violence and they also have a higher propensity to think that people cannot be trusted.
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COMIC BOOKS
Seduction of the Innocent is a book by German-born American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. I would be interested in knowing if he was around today what he would think of comic book movies being the most popular genre of film and massive money makers.
Wertham’s book was taken very seriously at the time in the United States and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in American parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship.
A congressional investigation into the comic book industry had been started. After the release of Seduction of the Innocent, publishers voluntarily founded the Comics Code Authority to self-censor their works.
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VIDEO GAMES
The first major controversy over video games in the United States was in the early 1990s, when games such as Mortal Kombat and Night Trap were released, which were known for imagery that younger viewers could deem excessively graphic or explicit. In the end, the American Congress was made aware of the video gaming issue.
After a proposal to have a government commission to establish video game ratings, the Interactive Digital Software Association was established by major video game corporations and presented the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to Congress, which was approved and would become the standard of video game ratings.
Jack Thompson, an American activist, and disbarred attorney, has criticized “violent video games”, claiming that playing violent video games leads to teenagers replicating those behaviors in the real world.
He often represented victims or parents of victims in cases regarding shootings, usually blaming the actions on the perpetrator having played violent video games. Additionally, Thompson backed a movement that aimed to prevent Bully’s publication.
It speaks volumes that a disbarred attorney is attempting to set his values on society when he seems to lack his own.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
If you live in the world of social media all this will seem very familiar to you. If you read through each media here and the history behind people attempting to censor it all have the same story. There’s always a person or persons who think they can live your life better than you can. They’ll blame society’s woes on everything except for the actual issue which is the individual and human nature.
Since the beginning of time, people have remained constant. The certain forms of media listed here certainly have an influence. Your typical person doesn’t watch a violent movie or play a violent video game and then go off to do a random act of violence. Our society does not work that way. Human nature does not work that way.
I’ve been this article together to show you the similarities of censoring media over time. History does indeed repeat itself and it seems people never learn from that. Social Media is not the root of all evil any more than movies or television or comic books are any media is concerned. Social Media is another outlet to relay information, share ideas, and converse with each other. Social Media Is not the downfall of Western Society.
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