People Have Been Panicking About New Media Since Before the Printing Press
ARE TEENAGERS ADDICTED to social media—and more depressed than ever because of it? Many politicians, consumer advocates, and even former employees of tech companies seem to think so.
The anti-tech consensus that’s emerging includes a diverse array of characters: populist conservative political figures such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.); generational psychologist Jean Twenge; and Tristan Harris, a former ethicist and designer at Google, to name just a few.
They share a belief that modern technologies—smartphones in particular—are extremely addictive and therefore dangerous. Smartphones learn about you, which means they get better at keeping you hooked. The smartphone provides access to all sorts of apps using all sorts of sophisticated strategies to lure users back to the home menu and start swiping, sharing, and snapping. The result, according to the technophobes, is an epidemic of dependency and depression, particularly among young people.
“Big Tech works relentlessly to force individuals into its ecosystems of addiction, exhibitionism, and fear of missing out,” writes Hawley in his recent book, The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery Publishing). “It seeks to create its own social universe and draw all life into its orbit.” To defeat the menace, Hawley and his allies have proposed various schemes to bring Facebook, Google, and Twitter to heel—by limiting their features, taking away certain protections from legal liability, and even breaking them apart entirely.
Though the technology may be new, the irrational fear is not. Every invention that has expanded the communicative space—from the written word to the radio—has been accompanied by histrionic concerns about the potential for misuse and abuse. The fact that so many of these earlier tech panics failed the test of time should make us even more wary of the current paranoia.
In 2020, for instance, Pope Francis published an encyclical warning about the dangers of screen addiction. “Digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships,” he wrote. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: In 1956, Pope Pius XII had warned that certain books emphasizing vice have an effect on readers that “totally paralyzes higher faculties and produces a permanent disorder, an artificial need of passionate character that at times reaches a real aberration.”
In 1936, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a “determined movement” had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused car accidents. The car radio was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the product’s dangers. fretted in 1926 that radio was “keeping children and their parents up late nights, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep and making laggards out of them at school.” In his 1963 book, , the Dutch-American sociologist Ernest van den Haag lamented that the portable radio “is taken everywhere—from seashore to mountaintop—and everywhere it
