As I may just possibly have remarked before...
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. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2882327.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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