by Nick Bilton
“No one who can sit in his study with his telephone by his side and thus listen to the performance of an opera at the Academy will care to go to Fourteenth Street and to spend the evening in a hot and crowded building.… The rural visitor who spends a Sunday in town and reads a printed notice in the office of his hotel to the effect that ‘Talmage’s sermons … can be had at eleven o’clock in the telephonic room,’ will, of course, give up his original intention of risking a journey to Brooklyn.… Thus the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every home, will empty the concert halls and the churches.… It is an unpleasant task to point out a possibly sinister purpose on the part of an inventor of conceded genius and ostensibly benevolent intentions. Nevertheless, a patriotic regard for the success of our approaching Centennial celebration renders it necessary to warn the managers of the Philadelphia exhibition that the telephone may really be a device of the enemies of the Republic.”
But before Reuss (whose name actually was spelled Reis) had a chance to destroy society as it was then known, along came Alexander Graham Bell’s version of the telephone, which for many decades has allowed us not only to be in constant contact with friends and loved ones but to perform business transactions from thousands of miles away. Although the Times noted that the telephone could bring others’ voices into the home, the author was fearful of the uncertain future—and sure it would eliminate the need for people ever to leave the house. People were clearly scared of the possibilities, but it didn’t take long before another technology reared its ugly head.
Just a year and a half later, the Times was even more despondent about the phonograph, which could preserve those precious sounds and words for years or decades to come.2 “The lecturer will no longer require his audience to meet him in a public hall, but will sell his lectures in quart bottles, at fifty cents each; and the politician, instead of howling himself hoarse on the platform, will have a pint of his best speech put into the hands of each of his constituents,” the paper wrote in November 1877.
But the real danger—the most serious threat to society—lurked ahead, the paper warned: “There is good reason to believe that if the phonograph proves to be what its inventor claims that it is, both book-making and reading will fall into disuse. Why should we print a speech when it can be bottled, and why should we learn to read when, if some skilled elocutionist merely repeats one of ‘George Eliot’s’ novels aloud in the presence of a phonograph, we can subsequently listen to it without taking the slightest trouble?…
“Blessed will be the lot of the small boy of the future. He will never have to learn his letters or to wrestle with the spelling book.…”
Fear of the new and fear of the unknown are common afflictions. At their worst, they can stunt or stop innovation. More commonly, though, this technology hypochondria—or technochondria, if you will—rattles a large part of the population, leading to a divide between those who rush forward with new experiences, fearful that they might miss something, and those whose fright leaves them feeling disoriented and left behind.
With so much anxiety, it can be hard, if not impossible, to board the moving train—quite literally. Even the arrival of train transportation came with a railcar full of fears that left some holding on tightly to their horses. A number of historians note that the railway brought an incredible amount of anxiety across all levels of society.3 For example, according to one history book, the nineteenth-century beginnings of rail transportation in Great Britain stirred up “extraordinary paranoia”: “It was claimed that trains would blight crops with their smoke and terrify livestock with their noise, that people would asphyxiate if carried at speeds of more than twenty miles per hour, and that hundreds would yearly die beneath locomotive wheels or in fires and boiler explosions. Many saw the railway as a threat to the social order, allowing the lower classes to travel too freely, weakening moral standards and dissolving the traditional bonds of community.”
That’s right: Some people theorized that if humans traveled at more than twenty miles per hour, they would suffocate. Or worse. Anne Harrington, chair of Harvard’s history of science department, found that scientists also believed that traveling at a certain speed “could actually make our bones fall apart.”
After reading numerous articles, papers, and discussions of the mid-1800s, Harrington discovered that nerve specialists and psychiatrists, including extremely well-respected scientists and physicians, were behind those theories too. Eventually these medical conditions earned their own diagnoses. Nineteenth-century citizens suffered from such ailments as “railway phobia” and “railway spine,” a debilitating result of sudden stops. This wasn’t an affliction to be taken lightly. In 1867, John Eric Erichsen, a well-respected fellow and professor of surgery in Philadelphia, wrote one of the many books on the topic, titled On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System.
In a normal progression, fear of the new morphed over time into a fear of the unknown outcome. “The more extreme fears did recede as the railways spread, becoming established as an economic and social necessity and proving their ability to function safely and reliably; yet below the superficial acceptance deep disquiet remained,” the railway history continued. “Rather than disappearing altogether, the fear and anxiety provoked by the railway changed in nature as the nineteenth century progressed, becoming a fear of internal rather than external disruption.
“The reasons for this change lay in the unique potency of the railway as a symbol of modernity. In the scale and sophistication of its engineering, the order and complexity of its operation, the speed and power of its technology, the railway embodied all the forces of mechanization, organization and industrialized progress which lay behind modern civilization.” Like many technologies today, its true long-term impact was hard to gauge.
From 122 Books to 7 Million
Fear certainly makes for good headlines. But fearful and anxious reactions to innovation also keep us from seeing the bigger potential of new ideas. There’s an all too human tendency to believe that what we know and experience now is the way it will and always should be.
So in worrying that the telephone and the phonograph would replace concerts and reading, critics of the day were simply not able to perceive the possibility that those devices would bring music and ideas to a much broader audience. Most people could not envision that phonographs—followed by cassettes, followed by digital downloads of music—would build such a base of fans that some day a hundred thousand people would gather to hear live concerts at a football stadium.
The printing press was subject to the same kind of narrow thinking. When Johannes Gutenberg used his revolutionary invention to publish the Gutenberg Bible in 1452, his work didn’t make much of a splash. Until then, books had been painstakingly copied by hand by monks. Each letter was intricately drawn, each word planned out, mulled over, and painstakingly transcribed. Making books was considered an art form—actually referred to as the “black art.” (This line of work received its ominous name from the black ink that stained the workers’ hands after a long day creating type.) Readers, for the most part, were scholars and the religious elite.
If you traveled back in time to 1424 and entered the University of Cambridge in England, you would find one of the largest libraries in Europe.4 Here you could see an impressive list of 122 books. The books were delicate, large, and beautiful. As the books were made by hand, it took another fifty years before the collection would reach an even more admirable 330 books. (Today, the University of Cambridge has more than 7 million books.)
Then, out of the blue, what had taken monks months or even years to produce could be done in a matter of hours. As word of the printing press gradually spread through Europe, the monks were curious about the new technology but didn’t see any reason to worry about it.5 To them, such a modest reproduction couldn’t hold a candle to their exquisite handcrafted works. In addition, most laypeople were not literate, so the new technology essentially was being tested in a vacuum. Most people in
fifteenth-century Europe weren’t interested in books and wouldn’t have cared about what a printing press could do. So even as the presses started to gain traction in the bookmaking industry, many dismissed the new technology. Those who wrote books by hand simply considered the product inferior—until it had largely replaced their trade.
Some politicians and clergy, however, despised this innovation. As Elizabeth Eisenstein chronicles in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the presses were the basis for the artistic Renaissance, the religious reformations, and the scientific revolution that spread new perspectives about physics, anatomy, and a variety of other sciences. Those powerful ideas helped move society from the Middle Ages to the modern sciences, displacing the ideas of the Church. The printing press allowed the spread of information that couldn’t be controlled by the clergy, kings, politicians, or the religious elite.
Still, it took a while for books to evolve into something that could be shared easily. Early books handmade by monks were massive and monstrously heavy, sometimes weighing more than fifty pounds, and about the width and height of a newspaper today. They weren’t the least bit portable. If you wanted to read a book, you went somewhere to do it. You certainly didn’t take it with you.
When Gutenberg and his collaborators developed the printing press, their goal wasn’t to innovate a new size or shape; it was to innovate the speed of production. The Gutenberg Bible, for example, consisted of two volumes and 1,286 pages. It was so heavy that it could be read only when one was standing at a lectern.
According to the book historian Alistair McCleery, it wasn’t until 1502 that Aldus Manutius in Venice came up with smaller, more portable books “that did not require a lectern or reading stand, or cause the reader’s arms to ache from holding them.”6 Manutius essentially invented the mobile phone of his day. He came up with the idea of smaller, mobile books that people could carry around and read anywhere—the first portable books that could fit in a large jacket pocket.
Then, once the presses showed their ability to change the power structure, the fear of this new printing contraption—now churning out more and more new material—began to grow. McCleery says that political and religious leaders panicked over the potential for so many new and varied ideas being shared without their help or approval. One Venetian judge condemned the change with the pronouncement “The pen is a virgin, the printing press a whore.”
Although this language is a little colorful for a judge, the fears that spread through society are understandable. In the past, you needed a pen and the ability to write to share your thoughts, opinions, and ideas—even on a limited scale. This changed rapidly when society gained access to a printing press and an individual could reach tens of thousands of literate people. The elite—the clergy and the nobility—had controlled the conversation when they controlled the pen.
The printing press, in comparison, could not be controlled—much as the Internet cannot be controlled today.
This kind of technochondria happens partly because of our fear of the new and in some instances is still prevalent in the power struggles of governments and citizens’ freedom. This was visible early in 2010 when a group of Chinese computer hackers managed to breach and steal user information from Google’s computer servers in that country. Google believed, from information it obtained, that the hackers were involved with the Chinese government and were trying to gain personal information about individuals who were illegally blogging within China. The Chinese authorities weren’t concerned only about the Internet and technology but about what they created: the power of access to unfettered information.
TV Will Rot Your Brain, Don’t You Know!
When a development is new and just catching on, we rarely have a clear vision of the future, an understanding of the effects.
We don’t really know how to integrate the innovation into our current habits and norms, and we also fear that adopting the new will affect our old ways of doing things. The tension, fear, and anxiety resolve only over long periods of time as we figure out how best to use the new technologies.
Television, for example, was expected to have devastating effects on the printed word and even the arts. A brief 1929 Washington Post article reported that meetings were held to discuss whether television would “detract from theatre attendance when it is more fully developed.”
Even when these technologies finally break through the obstacles and take off, we don’t really know what to do with them. The first television shows, created in the mid-1920s, were essentially filmed radio shows shot with a single camera. They were broadcast initially to the select few lucky homes equipped with the newfangled TVs capable of displaying fuzzy images in black and white. Gradually, the creators moved to three cameras, but they didn’t use any dramatic video cuts or special effects. The camera was stationary, and what viewers saw was often nothing more than a radio host, usually sitting behind a desk, puffing on a cigarette, and explaining a story just as if he were talking on the radio.
Early newspaper articles described the television as “radio with pictures,” and early TV series were called “radio serials.”7 Some shows were fifteen-minute segments without a single edit or transition. Still, people were mesmerized by television. They didn’t need fancy editing to keep their brains occupied. Just the fact that the image was moving was enough to keep a flow of energy zipping around their heads.
It took several decades for the medium to expand, eventually adding drama, comedy, more detailed news, and much fancier camera work—but even that wasn’t easy. When fast pacing and multiple cameras created different views on the screen, the old fears reared up again. Hundreds of papers and articles published from the early days of television all the way through to the advent of MTV’s fast-paced edits underlined and underscored the fears of parents, politicians, and clergy that television would corrupt and ruin society. Scholars and editorial writers were sure it would destroy our youth, inspire violence and sexual exploitation, and turn our brains to so much oatmeal-like mush. As humans, the reports said, we just weren’t built for consuming information this way.
Still, television got off relatively easy, maybe because all the generations enjoyed it. Although it still produces a fair bit of anxiety and concern, the backlash is nothing like the fear-driven fire and brimstone directed at comic books.
Bang! Pow! Bam! Danger Ahead!
Although comic-style illustrations can be traced back more than a thousand years, the genre really started to take form and become a mass medium between the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. Comic books grew dramatically at that time because their creators decided to focus on children, not just adults, and found an audience that could appreciate silly humor and illustrations. As a result, hundreds of new comic-book titles were born in the late 1930s, including the modern superheroes Batman and Superman. Another genre, “gross-out comics,” also emerged, with fare that was juvenile in nature and usually centered on crime, especially murder.
These more offensive stories drew the attention of parents and politicians, who came to be convinced that comic books would destroy the young people of the day and drive them to commit horrific crimes—much like the arguments we hear about video games today.
In April 1954, Congress began hearings accusing the comic-book industry of promoting and inciting juvenile delinquency. These hearings, which took place in New York City, were chaired by Robert Hendrickson, a Republican senator from New Jersey and chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. A Democratic senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, who previously had investigated organized crime, also played a prominent role in the hearings.
In the book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu writes that the outcome of the televised and much-publicized hearings was essentially decided before they began. The majority of the “experts” called in to testify were sure that the industry was destroying youth. On the first day of the hearings, Fredric Wertham, a famous psychiatrist know
n for his expertise on criminals and sex offenders, testified that he was certain, “without any reasonable doubt and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.” Wertham even called comics Superman and Tarzan sadistic and masochistic. Then he went further, saying quietly, “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.”
After the hearings, at least twelve states developed new anti–comic book laws and oversaw comic-book burnings. Congress urged the industry to police itself, and, feeling the pressure, a new comic-book industry oversight group was created called the Comics Magazines Association of America. This group came up with a set of strict rules, a “Code for Editorial Matter,” which make any video-game warnings we have today seem incredibly tame. To protect children of the future, the rules included the following:
Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.
Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous.… In every instance, good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.
Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.
All characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society.
