Older generations are always alarmed by whatever new thing young people are doing. It probably goes back to the Stone Age, when cavemen hectored their cave children to stop making dolls out of clay and the kids said, "OK, boomer."
Here are just a few of the popular pastimes that have caused great consternation in adults:
- Television (denounced for its "addictive nature" and seized on "to explain all the youth troubles" -- even blamed for neighbors' indifference to Kitty Genovese's 1964 murder);
- Arcade video games (alleged to cause "long-term psychological damage" and "increased hostility and violence among those who play them");
- Pinball machines ("the closeness of the machines to each other inside the busy arcades had sometimes led to fights among teenagers who bumped into one another");
- Rock lyrics ("A child psychiatrist testified that the notorious 'Son of Sam' serial killer David Berkowitz was known to listen to Black Sabbath, once fronted by the most frightening-to-parents avatar of '80s metal, Ozzy Osbourne");
- Violence on TV ("Since Jan Cummings banned her 5-year-old son, Joseph, from watching 'Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,' he no longer lunges around their Baltimore home karate-chopping and fan-kicking into thin air. 'I see a major difference in his behavior. He's much less aggressive,' she says.")
Then television became just another form of entertainment in advanced industrial nations. It turned out that the "bystander apathy" to Genovese's murder was an urban myth. Neighbors did call the police and go to her aid.
A study of arcade games by an MIT professor found "no evidence that playing the games makes children behave more violently."
Those degenerate pinball addicts seem to have turned out OK, too: In 2021, a pinball machine auction raised more than $3 million in three days, with some machines going for $10,000 or more.
First lady Tipper Gore became a punchline for her war against rock lyrics, while Osbourne gained the ultimate bourgeois respectability by starring in his own MTV reality show and appearing in a TV commercial for "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."
As for violence on TV, psychologist Jonathan L. Freedman pointed out, "Children in Japan watch probably the most violent, the most lurid and graphic television in the world, and the rate of violent crime there is minuscule compared to Canada and the United States."
Maybe adults should relax.
Alas, they can't. Today, the looming threat is "social media." Not liberals calling every white person not wearing a pussy hat a "white supremacist." Not teachers and psychologists tricking kids into poisoning and mutilating themselves in a fruitless quest to change their sex. Not Democratic DAs, judges and mayors refusing to lock up criminals.
Everything bad is social media's fault!
Schools are proudly taking students' phones away (where they might learn that they can't change their sex). Biden's finger-to-the-wind surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued a call last year for "warning labels" on social media -- after spending three years berating those same companies for allowing "misinformation" on their platforms, such as the wacky idea that children as young as 5 didn't actually need the COVID-19 vaccine.
And last week's man of the moment, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, blamed social media for the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Yes, apparently, what really incited Kirk's confessed assassin, Tyler Robinson, was not his left-wing politics, his confused sexuality or his romantic relationship with a male "transitioning" to female, but, said Cox, "those social media, those dark places of the internet where conflict entrepreneurs reside who are preying upon us."
Based on his deep cogitations, Cox said, "I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years."
That's like saying air has "played a direct role" in every assassination and assassination attempt. Except the air theory can't be proved false in 16 seconds.
There haven't been a lot of assassination attempts to investigate, but of the three most recent ones (that weren't caused by pure lunacy), two were older fellas, 66 and 58, with little to no social media activity. (James Hodgkinson, the leftist who shot up a Republican baseball practice in 2017, hitting Rep. Steve Scalise, and Ryan Wesley Routh, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf course.)
In fact, quite the opposite. Those two were perfect creations of the legacy media, babbling about "tax cuts for the rich," universal health care and Ukraine. (I mean, you NEVER hear about any of that outside the dark corners of the internet.) Hodgkinson, for example, wasn't lurking in the "dark places of the internet"; he was watching "Real Time With Bill Maher" and "The Rachel Maddow Show," his favorite TV programs.
The youngest attempted assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, appears to have had no friends on or off social media.
But Cox had a zippy line, so he had to use it. He told people to "go out and touch grass" -- a phrase as original as "tax cuts for the rich." (Maybe if Cox spent more time online, he'd come up with something interesting to say.)
Despite that well-known murder-repellent of touching grass, Trump's attempted assassin, Routh, spent 12 hours in a homemade deer blind on the periphery of Trump's golf course, waiting to take his shot. And yet all that closeness with Lyme-carrying ticks, fire ants and venomous spiders did nothing to lessen his homicidal intent.
Incidentally, social media has also played a "direct role" -- in reality, not in a Utah governor's imagination -- in half of all marriages over the last six years, 51% of all home purchases, the significant decline in drunk driving, the creation of innumerable new businesses and fewer bar fights over factual disputes that can be looked up in 10 seconds on Grok. Such as:
What's the meaning of "OK, boomer"?
OR
Who is Tipper Gore?