As I may just possibly have remarked before...

[oursin]

That thing where people attribute Bad Things Happening To/Being Done By Present-Day Youth to some singular phenomenon that was not around in Their Young Day: a limited list:

Young girls' minds being polluted by The Novel (eighteenth/early nineteenth century);

Werther Fever: young men in suicide cult imitating the hero of Goethe's novel. (This is something one would really wish Snopes had been around for at the time.)

Young men of the lower orders reading penny dreadfuls and turning to crime, or at least slacking off on being Industrious Apprentices/dutiful clerks. (Second verse, same as the first, for the Hollywood gangster movies of the 30s.)

Young men driven to suicide by the dreadful warnings of quack pamphlets about the outcome of self-abuse.

A generation no longer able to read proper solid prose because of the rise of TitBits snippety soundbitey journalism.

A whole swathe of These Dreadful Immoral Modern Dances/This Awful Modern Music. (Bunny-Hug, Turkey-Trot, even before getting to the Charleston...)

The pernicious effect of The Kinematograph.

?Possibly 'Khaki fever' fits in here?

Maenadic frenzy over pop-singers. (Ahem, didn't we see this over Liszt? or even earlier, over the top operatic castrati?)

'Video nasties'.

I will leave the conclusion for concerns over the dreadful things The Internet is doing to the present generation as an exercise for the reader.

Comments

[mirlacca]

Can we add The waltz to the list of Immoral Modern Dances?

[kore]

Young people holding each other closely! SHOCKER

Oh yeah, and the Twist was full of sexual depravity. So was jitterbugging at first.

[oursin]

Definitely!

[legionseagle]

Oh, yes. Maria Edgeworth in Patronage has a right down on the waltz.

[sylvaine]

Socrates lamenting that The Youths all knew how to read and write and thus weren't memorising things properly!

[cesy]

This one is definitely my favourite.

[kore]

In her lectures my mom called Liszt "The Elvis Presley of his day," which I loved.

[kore]

I have tracked the following ones through novels/nonfiction --

Multiple daily deliveries ruining letters

Telegraphs killing letters

Telephones killing letters

Email killing letters

(I think now we may be up to Twitter/Facebook killing email)

[oursin]

Were postcards killing the art of correspondence, I wonder?

[kore]

OMG YES. Also, naughty postcards Ruined Morals.

[brewsternorth]

I thought that was Slack that was killing email?

[bibliofile]

Don't forget preprinted holiday greeting cards killing proper correspondence in there, somewhere

[hunningham]

"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge."

Rev Enos Hitchcock, 1788. Just replace "romances, novels, and plays" with mobile phones / facebook / interwebs / popular pastime of your choice.

[ethelmay]

I was sad to see a posthumous (or was it republished?) diatribe by Oliver Sacks against cell phones in the latest New Yorker.

[silveradept]

Everything that is new is corrupting to the youths, mostly because everything new is oft classified as some new way for the childrens to be thinking about sexual behavior rather than turning their minds to piety or other "acceptable" pursuits.

[sylvaine]

Either that or, in modern times, it is Bad For The Health.

We did a thing about that in class last year or possibly the year before - in terms of modern technology, the only one that actually has any kind of scientifically proven bad health consequences is watching too much TV. Anything else - games, phones, the internet, what have you - is pretty much fine!

(Barring, of course, addictive problems, but that's a whole nother thing and never really addressed by these people either.)

[silveradept]

Indeed. They're also very likely to conflate "this thing happened at the intersection of mental illness and something that interacted with that illness" with "THIS THING IS TERRIBLE FOR EVERYONE." Certainly makes it easier to blame the thing rather than the infrastructure that makes it difficult to impossible to treat the illness.