Modernity and media panics

Library loans were relatively unaffected. Prompted by key publishing directors, the initial focus on video was widened to encompass the entire relation between visual and print media, a relation that was almost unanimously envisaged as an opposition. The police, teachers, and social workers get involved and people have what Cohen defines as a moral panic. Moral panics, according to Cohen, serve as ideological safety valves whose effect it is to restore social equilibrium. The development of the mass media and the reactions upon them must be understood in relation to the wider parameters of modernity . The economic and social upheavals of industrialisation, urbanisation, and secularisation have as their corollary profound transformations of cultural symbols, experiences, and expressions. In the history of mass communication, print media naturally offer the first examples of media panics.