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The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses.¿Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination.
The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.
List of contents
Foreword Introduction Part I: Approaches to the Media, Moral Panics and Social Fears 1. Model Answers: Moral Panics and Media History 2. Moral Panics, Emotion and Newspaper History 3. The Wertham Case: Evaluating Effects on Media Theories Part II: The media as an object of fear 4. ‘I Will Answer You, My Friend, but I am Afraid’: Telephones and the Fear of a New Medium in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Italy 5. The Dreadful World of Edwardian Wireless 6. Cinema, Social Fears and Moral Panics in Britain’s Tropical Empire 7. The Response to Television in the UK 1947-77: A Study in the Media and Social Fear Part III: Panics, fear and the media 8. Unmarried: Unmarried Motherhood in Post-First World War British Film 9. Watching the Detectives (and the Constables): Fearing the Police in 1920s Britain 10. Fifth Columnists, Collaborators and Black Marketeers: Fearing the ‘Enemy Within’ in the Wartime British Media 11. Citizenship, Sexual Anxiety and Womanhood in Second World War Britain: the Case of the Man with the Cleft Chin 12. ‘Enemy Television’: Fear as a Motive Force in East German Television Programming 13. ‘The Ugly Tide of Today’s Teenage Violence’: Revisiting the Clockwork Orange Controversy in the UK
About the author
Siân Nicholas is a Senior Lecturer in British History at Aberystwyth University and Co-Director of the Aberystwyth Centre for Media History, UK.
Tom O’Malley is Professor of Media in the Department of Theatre Film and Television at Aberystwyth University, UK.
Summary
The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination.
The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.
