Media Panic offers a cutting-edge analysis of a social problem that has attracted adults’ and particularly parents’ attention: that of the effects of children’s and young people’s use of new digital media on their personal and social identities. Using notion of media panic as an explanatory framework, it treats the full range of new media at young people’s disposal, including texting (and sexting), new social media, online videogames, and music sampling. With emphasis on contemporary responses to new digital media, this book also considers scholarly, popular, and governmental reactions to the introduction of previous media, including motion pictures, television, and comic books, in order to identify historical affinities and discontinuities.
Interdisciplinary in outlook, Media Panic employs methods and concepts gathered from media and cultural studies, sociology, historiography, and sexuality studies, to explore episodes that have occurred in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Turkey, and elsewhere. Looking beyond adults’ anxieties over children’s use of new media beyond the scope of their surveillance, this book assesses the real dangers and benefits offered by new media to young people and adults. As such it will appeal to readers with interests in sociology, cultural studies, legal studies and criminology, media studies, ethnicity, and gender and sexuality.