Each generation has its disturbing novelty. If now is the time of children absorbed by the screens, then the past is fraught with panic of all stripes. In the 80s, Dragon Ball Z appeared on the screens along with Club Dorothée, accompanied by a group of cartoons. A young deputy named Segolene Royal was worried: “too cruel”, “disgusting” … The future presidential candidate did not spare words about these programs from Japan.
Another big journey for the youth of the late 1970s: video games. A real “epidemic”, the term was promulgated during the alarming TV and press reports of the time. The fears always recurred in 1993 when video games were blamed for a documentary about the “destruction of culture” and “language”.
And while headphones are now commonplace, in 1984 the player’s reputation was not the best, as a doctor accused him of “inhibiting the functioning of other senses, from sight to touch.” Waving the threat of turning youth into zombies. A refrain taken up during his lifetime by the artist-painter Dali, who already considered cinema and television “one of the great modern means of goofing the crowd.”
And this is not new, because in the Middle Ages, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, we were already worried. Like 70 years ago, creating a paperback book was intimidating. The problem may not lie in the object itself, but in what we do with it.
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