New Media Are Evil: Difference between revisions

The motivation to [[Demonization|demonize]] a medium can go much deeper than the desire of the media itself to make headlines. In our giant, pan-corporate world, there's a good chance that some news outlets are owned by a guy who owns a major recording label. All of a sudden HQ's interest in stories about [[Digital Piracy Is Evil|devious pirating activities]] becomes quite noticeable. To an audience generally uninformed about what the [[New Media]] is like to begin with, whether or not the story is true is irrelevant: the ring of truth is what becomes important.

 

 

Take the Internet as an example; though it has come to dominate our lives today, it had a much greater mystique in [[The Nineties]] when it first became mainstream. People taking up professions in the media industry as a career and most of the people involved today ''still'' don't have a full grasp on what the Internet is, so when the assumption is that [[It's a Small Net After All]], all of a sudden every little instance of graphic pornography or 4chan vandalism ends up speaking for the Internet as a whole. New Media Are Evil decreases a great deal once the industry and society have adjusted to major technological advances and sees them as the norm. In other words, when the Medium stops being New, it stops being Evil.

* Some years ago, a Danish nerd created a website called Lej en Lejemorder. Which translates to "Book an Assassin". [[Stealth Parody|The Danish media thought he was serious]]. Much controversy about the internet ensued. (and apparently, the guy also got some serious emails from people who actually did want someone to be assassinated.)

* ''Essence'' magazine had an article about teens and their sex lives. It had this trope in spades, claiming that television and porn are the cause of the rampant teenage sex going on. It also had a little bit of [[Old Media Catching Up]] and [[You Can Panic Now]], since anybody that ''doesn't'' know that there is porn on the internet probably lives under a rock, or at the very least doesn't have any teenage kids.

* Some people in the free and open source software community, while often extremely technically literate, are often ambivalent or even outright hostile to social networking sites, mainly due to privacy issues.

* In "[http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-ways-binge-watching-will-ruin-television/ 4 Reasons 'Hemlock Grove' Is Television's Shitty Future]", [[Cracked.com|J. F. Sargent]] claims that unlike reading, TV watched [[Archive Binge|a season at a time]] discourages analysis and critical thinking in favor of "passively absorbing it like a big sopping couch-sponge." People just stop noticing [[padding]] and other [[Sturgeon's Tropes|hallmarks of sloppy writing]]. ''[[Hemlock Grove]]'' is guilty.

{{related|You Can Panic Now}}

{{related|Old Media Playing Catch Up}}

[[Category:New Media Tropes]]

[[Category:Turn of the Millennium]]

[[Category:The Internet]]

[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]