ABSTRACT
Young people are attracted enthusiastically to new forms of media, often with a level of impetuosity, perhaps surpassing that of adults, and certainly often provoking adult anxieties. Livingstone acknowledged the often-precarious "combination of children, media and change" and the manner in which these factors have "always proved particularly explosive – catalyzing society's perennial anxieties about childhood, triggering media headlines, public anxieties, moral panics, official inquiries". It is evident that our education system reflects a system that is less concerned with the cognitive development of learners than on the maintenance of power relationships. A special case of moral panic is the media panic. The introduction of the cinema early in the 20th century, and the earlier introduction of the nickelodeons sparked their own moral panic. The comic book moral panic of the 1940s and 1950s had deep eugenic underpinnings. Violence breeds violence, as moral panics are reshaped in the face of new developments in social media.
