When new technology or art arrives on the scene, people worry. And while it’s easy to criticize, we should acknowledge that they’re right to worry. New technology, especially, really does change the fabric of society. It shifts the paradigms of our children and permanently changes day-to-day living in the present and the future.
What’s interesting, however, is our inability as a collective to notice our patterns of repeated behavior in regard to change. While we scoff at Ambrose Bierce calling the telephone, “An invention of the devil…” we are earnestly concerned about the technology of today eroding our neural networks.
When we go back far enough in time, we see the fuller picture of our response to change, so let’s travel back now to 1930s America for some perspective; a time when violence on the radio was harming our children and represented a growing blight in society.
Thanks to Dr. Amanda Lynn Bruce, and her academic work, Creating Consumers and Protecting Children: Radio Early Television and the American Child, we have a full picture of the hand wringing that surrounded early radio.
The Women’s National Radio Committee had a primary concern: radio was “appealing to children over the head of parents,” and they reported that other parents believed “avid radio habits disrupted family harmony.” Afterall, “Children refused to do their homework and chores when their radio programs aired.”
It was keeping them up late, giving them stomach aches, ruining schoolwork and they were going to their friends houses to listen and circumvent house rules on such things. Some lax parents were letting kids have radios in their rooms while responsible mothers were just getting rid of radios in the home altogether for the sake of children.
But for those unwilling to go extreme, there was lobbying for better management. Advocating for time limits and most of all “appropriate” programming and advertising was the core objective of The Women’s National Radio Committee in the early 30s. They successfully lobbied the FCC to eliminate commercials about “laxatives and deodorant” during children’s programming.
Things only got worse for the kids after Orson Wells War of the Worlds Radio broadcast of 1938 scared the crap out of a few adults. Radio alarmists claimed it caused widespread panic, although “widespread” was arguably not the case. But the fear got traction, as it always does, and wheels started turning. If this could happen to adults, think of the trauma being caused to a young, easily influenced mind?
The National Congress of Parents and Teachers advocated the Radio Chairman for a “Finer, cleaner radio diet for children” and had some success in getting violent shows like “The Shadow,” and “Dick Tracy” into later time slots because crime filled programs were likely to lead to “criminal or violent behavior.”
Not to get ahead of the radio controversy, but the Gangbuster (True Crime Radio Hour) was spun into a comic book in 1947, joining Dick Tracy, and these comics were topics, among others, of the 1954 congressional subcommittee meeting on comic books and juvenile delinquency.
If you fancied this radio thing a silly past issue consider the controversy once “satan’s music” began replacing Frank Sinatra and Big Band tunes on that same radio. Frank Sinatra himself had nothing nice to say. In the French Magazine, Western World, he said, ““My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ‘n’ roll. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
Ah yes. Damn sideburns. It’s fair to say his fans agreed. No one bothered, at this point to get all of “Rock and Roll” off the radio, but censoring was born in earnest as many selectively banned “offensive” songs like “Rumble” by Link Wray (reported on here by PopHistoryDig). The song, which has no words, was banned because censors feared it would “incite gang violence.” Listen HERE if you dare.
Once Rock and Roll was accepted by the mainstream we, as a society, turned our ire toward rap music in the early 90s and again took it to a congressional committee because parents and congressman, Joe Lieberman, shared concern: “We’re worried about values, we’re worried about moral decline in our society.”
Now that we’re in the 90s, some may start to protest. Well rap music IS changing society for the worse. But again, the fact is, the closer we get to an art or technology affecting or changing our daily life, the more we fear its normalization and assimilation into our society. While most born after 1940 might read Frank Sinatra’s comment and roll their eyes, fewer in the Rock and Roll generation would also fully reject Lieberman’s comment.
Why are we so prone so repeat these trends? Why do we repeatedly believe that our current tech, art and media “controversy” is the one that is truly eroding society and hearkening destruction?
Perhaps we’re prone to repeating these controversy trends because we’re right about our fears. These new and strange things are destroying life as we know it. The real question then is why do we continually believe our current reality is better than what’s to come? Why do we continue to doubt that a different future might be a better future?
We could at least acknowledge that just because the future is beyond our experience and imaginations, doesn’t mean it will be bad. History shows us it simply has different benefits and different drawbacks. Isn’t it time we realized and accepted that technology changing society is a natural and normal part of social evolution?
Until then, stay tuned for the next article: We’re Screwing Up the Kids: Television Edition.