LogFAQs > #971758411

Kind of a sidebar here, but I feel like there's this meme every time a new technology gets criticism that goes "People always complain about new technology. Why, people even complained about the telephone." with the unstated implication being that those criticism weren't valid, so these aren't either.

But, a lot of the contemporaneous criticisms about items like the telephone WERE valid! It did ruin the art of letter writing; it was noisy and disruptive in households. Same with other technologies. Television did shorten attention spans. It was just that we, as a society and as individuals, both consciously and unconsciously, decided that the positives outweighed the negatives for these technologies, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist, and we've done a great disservice over the years by pretending that they didn't, both when it comes to the technologies in question, and when it comes to emerging technologies in the future.