Is ever-better video content breaking society?

The decades-long moral panic about television has probably been right all along

The term “moral panic” has been overused in recent years, but I think many of the latest takes on smartphones (they need to be banned from school and are responsible for a surge in teen suicides) have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic.

In essence, our youthful mischief and entertainments were wholesome and beloved, whereas the new ones are wicked and evil. It’s something we heard about rap music and video games when I was a kid and about everything from Dungeons & Dragons to jazz to comic books before that. And yet as Tim Cook encourages us to spend more time sitting alone in dark rooms, enjoying immersive audiovisual experiences, I can’t help but think that the panickers, at least those of the last few decades, might have been on to something.

A classic trope of the “don’t worry so much” discourse reminds us that these concerns have been with us since the dawn of television and that efforts to find causal links between new content types and bad behavior tend to produce ambigu…