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Were people ever concerned about other media when they were new?

obssesednuker said:
Wasn't that more of a warning about the destruction of intellectual property rather then railing against any particular form of media?
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Not according to Ray Bradbury.

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction
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Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.


His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day's L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
"Useless," Bradbury says. "They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full." He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He's now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (Ray Bradbury | Books), titled "Bradbury on censorship/television."
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Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted
 
Funniest of these I've read was about paperback books. The argument went that cheap books would lead to a mass market of garbage, which of course is utterly ridicu... uh
 
Gurgeh said:
Since there are a lot of articles online about how the Internet is "ruining our brains" or "ruining society and how things were" did people ever fear other media forms when they were new? I still remember the whole violent video games debate about how video games are going to turn us into mass killers. There was also the anti comic book scare back in the 50s with that one doctor who wrote the book "The Seduction of the Innocent". Any other examples of people fearing new media?
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Well, there was Videodrome and related things with McLuhan and fear of TV. McLuhan goes full frontal on media and tries to pick it apart and categorize it starting with writing and the electric light and finishing with TV's. I believe he died before he could get a proper handle on the internet.
 
I've read that lots of the hype over the supposed "panic" over the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast was in fact newspapers trying to hype what they saw as "unreliable" radio as opposed to the steady, reliable newspapers.
 
The MPAA and it's equivalents in other industries.

Every time a new means to sell the products they try to control, they respond by trying to sue that company for "infringing on their copyrights."

VCR? Lawsuit. DVD? Lawsuit. iPod? LAWSUIT.

They have routinely been defeated. And the sad part is that those technologies ended up making them more money long run.
 
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