PROBLEMATIC AND BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF
N E W M E D I A U S E ( P B MU )
LECTURE 1: BETWEEN EUPHORIA AND MORAL PANICS
Media: Popular(pre/Victorian) novels
- 19th century
- Today’s school readings like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, ...
- Women could suffer overexcitement from reading, waste household time
- Corruption of young men (emulate criminal lifestyle)
Movies
- The devil’s camera, written in 1932 by two journalists
- “It is unimaginably tragic that at [this] time the cinemas should be revelling in squandermania, promiscuity,
crime and idleness. Our national strength is being sapped, our capacity to triumph over adversity
undermined.”
Comic books
- Seduction of the innocent, 1954 by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham
- Comic books as cause of juvenile delinquency
- Calls for censor ships and U.S. congressional inquiry
Moral panics…a termed by Cohen (1972)
- Accusations against new sub-culture (young British working-class) ◊threat of social order or values
- Pursued by establishment, “right-thinking people” (traditionally high social standing) and self-proclaimed
“experts”
- Moral condemnation
- Publicized through mass media
- Claims based on anecdotal urban myths rather than quantifiable evidence (experts often have little direct
experience)
3 core characteristics of moral panics
1. Uncertainty
- New behavior, nonormative conventionyet
- Unknown effects
2. Normative
- Strong moral judgments
- Judges are from establishment (politicians, parents, older people)
- Self-proclaimed experts
3. Often focused on ostensibly vulnerable groups
- Children, adolescents, the „youth“ (early adopters)
- Women
- Working class
1
,Moral, media, technology panics: Why?
1. Uncertainty
2. Elites wanting to conserve status quo, «stay in power»
3. Cultural elites concerned about upbringing of children (weakening of cognitive skills, unleashed impulses) 🡪
good vs. bad taste or high vs. low culture
3 core answers from science
Always good to remember!
1. Prevalence
- How many people involved or affected
- How often does symptom occur?
2. Causality
- Media use → X
- X → media use?
- Other factors affecting X?
3. Effect size
- How strong is media use <> X effect?
3 stages in research
If a new medium is on the rise in society...
1. Crime & time –related research: Is it there?
- Prevalence
- Simple effects (e.g., exposure 🡪 effect and reporting of effect sizes)
2. Complex causal analyses and theory-building: When and how does it work?
- Moderation analyses 🡪 Who? 🡪 Risk-groups
- Mediation analyses 🡪 Why? 🡪 Process
3. Cumulated evidence: Can we be sure?
- Literature reviews
- Meta-analyses
2
,The Sisyphean cycle of technology panics. The four stages of the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics:
1. In Stage 1 (panic creation), psychological and sociological factors lead to a society becoming worried about a
new technology.
2. In Stage 2 (political outsourcing), politicians encourage or utilize technology panics for political gain but
outsource the search for solutions to science.
3. In Stage 3 (wheel reinvention), scientists start working on a new technology but lack the theoretical and
methodological frameworks to efficiently guide their work.
4. In Stage 4 (no progress; new panic), scientific progress is too slow to guide effective technology policy and the
cycle restarts because a new technology gains popularity and garners public, policy, and academic attention.
Although the accumulation of societal concern is a complex process, there are certain drivers and reactions to
technologies that do much to promote technology panics. In this article, I focus on technological determinism, which
plays a crucial role in initial reactions to new technologies, and moral panics, a framework that establishes how
societal panics can emerge and develop.
- Technological determinism. The predominant approach to technological innovations has been technological
determinism, the idea (a) that the technologies used by a society form basic and fundamental conditions that
affect all areas of existence and (b) that when such technologies are innovated, these developments are the
single most important driver of changes in said society (Leonardi, 2012). Technology is therefore seen as a
foundation for and agent of change, whereas society itself is assumed to have little power to influence the
technologies themselves.
- Moral panics are rapid increases in concern that occur regularly throughout public life. A person, group, thing,
event, or other entity is perceived as challenging societal values and norms. This causes introspective “soul
searching” in the population and moral condemnation (Garland, 2008). The moral panic, represented in
stylized and stereotypical ways, progressively becomes defined as a severe threat
Recall from Amy's article what she says about how policy makers pick up societal fears and then "reward" (via research
money) scientists to study these - while scientists always start from scratch (reinvent the wheel) and are slow in
providing evidence. Also recall what Amy suggests scientists an do to break the cycle (like developing better and more
universal media effects theories + setting up an expert committee to give quick answers to politicians).
3
, After the lecture, think once more about the following questions:
● What is a moral panic? What are typical characteristics?
● Why are moral panics often technology or media panics?
● What is the Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics (see reading by Orban) about?
o What are stages of this cycle?
o How can we perhaps break this cycle?
● Why do we often encounter moral outcries against audio-visual media (e.g., comic books, TV, movies,
games) but not such much written media (books, newspapers, see for example Drotner, p. 605)? How
does this link to the art=high culture vs. media/entertainment=low culture distinction?
● Could it also be dysfunctional to warn of moral panics and to disencourage a critical debate about new
media tech or media tech companies?
● Given that we face moral panics, why is it important that a MA track on media psychology features a class
like PBMU?
● What "scientific facts" regarding potential problems associated with media use do media psychologists
deliver (check slide about 3 core answers from science)?
● In the lecture I pitch the "scientific approach" against moral panics. But is the scientific
approach immune to moral panics? …….no…
4
