

“ Social Media Can Steal Childhood” reads another in Bloomberg Businessweek. The instruments have changed, but the song remains the same, “ Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” reads one headline in The Atlantic. Yet, today we find ourselves in the grips of another moral panic-this time around social media. The new has become the old, the shocking has become the expected. Time has resolved our collective anxiety. And after hundreds of studies across multiple decades, the American Psychological Association reports that they still haven’t found any evidence that playing video games motivates people to commit violence. Today, we chuckle at the hair metal bands of the late eighties as innocent fun while the shocking hip hop of the early nineties has evolved into a cornerstone of our modern culture.

This video game is what caused the downfall of human civilization. And it was only fitting that such an incomprehensible act be explained by such a new and incomprehensible form of entertainment. Back then, school shootings were still a rare occurrence. The Columbine Massacre in 1999 was peak hand-wringing about violent entertainment. In case anyone asks, this is the album that caused the downfall of human civilization.īy the time I reached adolescence, the grown-ups had moved on from offensive music and commenced their hysterics over the corruptive forces of violent video games. I can still see my father breaking my Bone Thugs-N-Harmony CD in half when he realized they dropped more F-Bombs than Nixon in Cambodia. I remember hiding the parental warning labels when asking my mom to buy the new Pantera album. I remember my friend’s mother making him throw away all of his Metallica tapes. When I was a kid, there were serious discussions in churches, schools, and in front of Congress about whether the music my friends and I listened to might be satanic.
