Why New Technology Sparks Moral Panic
Writing, the printing press, comics and the smartphone each drew the same alarm. Sociology has a name for the pattern and five tests for it. The evidence explains why the reaction recurs and why the research it commissions never settles anything. It cannot measure the harm.
Answer to the question
Why does new technology cause moral panic?
A moral panic follows a pattern, and new media fit it because they are tied to the young. Goode and Ben-Yehuda offer three origins: public fear, elite manufacture or an interest group. Marwick found press coverage, harm to children and legislation in two technology panics, and Orben found the research commissioned each time restarts from nothing.
Key takeaways
- Stanley Cohen built the idea of a moral panic in 1972 on the mods and rockers, whose 1964 bank-holiday clashes were reported nationally as a collapse of the young.
- Goode and Ben-Yehuda set five tests in 1994, and the hardest is disproportionality, which needs an agreed measure of the actual harm.
- Marwick found in 2008 that the 1996 cyberporn panic and the MySpace predator panic shared press coverage, harm to children as a justification and legislation.
- Orben argued in 2020 that research commissioned to calm each panic restarts from nothing, and Harkness found in Lasch's 1979 book a description that already fits social media.
In Plato's Phaedrus, the Egyptian king Thamus tells the god Theuth that writing will give learners "a recipe not for memory, but for reminder". In the fifteenth century a Venetian monk, Filippo di Strata, attacked the printing press. A nineteenth-century medical journal blamed an educational craze for rising insanity, and Gramophone later worried about children and the radio. Each is a moral panic about a medium.
Nir Eyal collects this lineage in Indistractable to argue that today's alarm about screens is the latest entry. Critics answer that a long record of false alarms cannot show that this one is false. Both are right about what a list can do: it shows that a reaction recurs, and it says nothing about whether the thing reacted to does harm. The better question is what produces the reaction, and sociology has had an answer to that for half a century.
Cohen's mods and rockers, and five tests of a panic
The standard case of a moral panic is the one Stanley Cohen built on two English youth groups, the mods and the rockers. Summaries of his study describe minor clashes at the seaside town of Clacton during a bank-holiday weekend in the mid-sixties, reported nationally as a sign that the young were out of control. Reporters were waiting at Brighton for the next holiday, police patrolled more heavily and arrested more youths, and the two groups came to see themselves as opposed to each other in a way they had not before.
Cohen's interest lay in that machinery more than in the fighting. The press supplied a stereotype, the stereotype shaped the policing, and the policing produced more of what it was policing. The group at the centre he called the folk devil, and the panic needs one: a real subculture that is held to stand for something rotten. This account of Cohen comes from later summaries, not from the book, and the phrase itself has a rival claimant. Jock Young's The Drugtakers, published the year before, used it first, by secondary accounts, and the two men worked on the same problem at the same time.
The press supplied a stereotype, the stereotype shaped the policing, and the policing produced more of what it was policing.
A concept built on one case needs a test, and Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda supplied five in their book Moral Panics. There must be heightened concern about a group's behaviour, and hostility toward the group as an enemy. The concern has to be widely shared. The alarm has to exceed what the evidence of harm supports. And the whole episode has to erupt and subside quickly, although the rules it leaves behind usually stay.
The fourth test carries the weight and is the hardest to apply. To say a reaction is out of proportion, someone must agree a measure of the actual harm, and for most of the cases the concept covers, no such measure exists or the measure is itself disputed. The charge against the framework is that the analyst's own politics decide which reactions count as panics. That weakness matters for technology, where the harm is exactly what is being argued about.
Who starts a panic: the public, the powerful, a lobby?
Where a panic comes from has three competing answers, set out in Goode and Ben-Yehuda's 1994 review in the Annual Review of Sociology. In the grassroots account, real public fear rises from below and the press and politicians follow it. In the elite-engineered account, powerful groups manufacture the alarm to distract from something else. In the interest-group account, an organisation with a stake in the outcome, such as a profession or a campaign, drives it.
The pattern was examined on technology in a 2008 paper in First Monday by Alice Marwick. She set the 1996 panic over online pornography beside the later panic over predators on MySpace and found the same parts. Media coverage fuelled both, harm to children justified restricting what could be said online, and both led to legislation, including the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act, which she argued was misguided. Her abstract places the press and legislators at the centre, not public fear alone, which fits the second and third accounts at least as well as the first. She also gave the technology version a name, the technopanic.
What do Orben and Harkness add to the picture?
If panics keep returning, the research they commission should accumulate. Amy Orben argued in 2020 that it does not. In "The Sisyphean cycle of technology panics", in Perspectives on Psychological Science, she describes a loop. Public worry about a new technology rises, and psychologists are asked to study its effects on young people in order to calm it. There is no theoretical baseline carried over from the previous medium, so each study starts from nothing, and the policy response that might make the technology safer is delayed.
The cycle adds something the three accounts of origin leave out, which is what happens after the alarm. Those accounts say why a panic starts. Orben says why it never produces an answer: the question is asked afresh each time, under time pressure, by people who inherit no framework from the last round. That also deepens the problem with the fourth test above. A reaction cannot be shown to be disproportionate if the measure of harm is rebuilt, and left unfinished, with every new medium.
A different argument refuses the framing of cause and medium altogether. In Technology Is Not the Problem (2024), Timandra Harkness quotes Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism: "the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience." Her next line is her own: "This sounds so much like today's world of social media that I flip back to check the original publication date: 1979."
Her inference is that a description written before a technology existed, which fits the behaviour the technology is blamed for, suggests the condition came first. In her wider argument the demand for recognition drives the technology, and the technology profits from the demand. She does not say the technology is harmless, and elsewhere in the book she concedes that it shapes the people it profiles. The dated-text argument is an interpretation, since the text is not in dispute and the inference is. It is also a different kind of evidence from the lineage, because it points to a specific earlier source rather than to a pattern of recurrence.
What the moral panic label can and cannot show
The strongest objection to the model came in 1995, from Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton. As summaries of their paper have it, Cohen's model assumes a small number of outlets and folk devils with no voice. In a fragmented media world the folk devils answer back in the same outlets, and some subcultures court the panic because it helps them.
The concept survives that objection as a lens with a known bias. Calling an alarm a moral panic is a claim about how a society handled it, and it needs the same evidence as the claim it answers. Eyal's lineage, Orben's cycle and Harkness's dated text each describe something real: a reaction that recurs, a research loop that restarts, a condition that predates its supposed cause. None of them measures harm.
Only a measure of harm built for each medium could show whether an alarm was out of scale, and neither the reactions nor the research supply one.
Common questions
Why does new technology cause moral panic?
A moral panic follows a pattern, and new media fit it well because they are tied to the young. Goode and Ben-Yehuda offer three accounts of the source: public fear, elite manufacture or an interest group. Marwick's study of cyberporn and MySpace points to press coverage and legislators. Orben adds that the research commissioned in response restarts each time.
What is a moral panic?
A moral panic is a brief, loud reaction in which a society treats a group as a threat to its values. Stanley Cohen developed the idea in 1972 from the mods and rockers. Goode and Ben-Yehuda set five tests in 1994: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility.
Does a moral panic mean the fear was wrong?
No. The label describes the reaction, not the harm. A pattern of earlier false alarms is a reason to weigh a claim carefully, and it cannot show that a particular claim is false. Harm has to be measured separately for each technology.
Sources
Harkness, T. (2024). Technology Is Not the Problem. London: HQ, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Lasch is quoted as in Harkness, p. 199
Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Known here through secondary summaries
Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell
Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). 'Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction.' Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149-171. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.20.080194.001053
Marwick, A. E. (2008). 'To catch a predator? The MySpace moral panic.' First Monday, 13(6). doi:10.5210/fm.v13i6.2152
Orben, A. (2020). 'The Sisyphean cycle of technology panics.' Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/1745691620919372
McRobbie, A., & Thornton, S. L. (1995). 'Rethinking Moral Panic for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds.' British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), 559-574. doi:10.2307/591571
Eyal, N. (2019). Indistractable. Dallas: BenBella Books
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows. New York: W. W. Norton