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Fiction
I found the dog. I also found a lot of people's Social Security numbers—y'know, this Internet has gone too far.
— Elroy, Community, "Basic Crisis Room Decorum"
Harman, the size of the world has changed. It's changed to the size where you can control it with your hands just like a PDA. The world will... keep getting smaller. (laughs)
— Kun Lan, Killer7
The individual is supposed to be weak. But far from powerless — a single person has the potential to ruin the world. And the age of digitized communication has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature species.
— The Patriots, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Dr. Melfi: Sounds to me like Anthony Junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: Fuckin' internet.
Tony: Fuckin' internet.
— The Sopranos, "D-Girl"
He lived in a time when Fascism, like a virus—like the AIDS virus—needed a strong host in order to spread. Germany was that host. But Germany did not prevail. The world was too big. Fortunately, the world has changed. Global communications, cable TV, the internet. Today the world is smaller and a virus does not need a strong host in order to spread. The virus... is airborne.
— Dressler on Adolf Hitler, The Sum of All Fears
He's been playing those video games an awful lot. Makes him a very good shooter. Holding that controller's like holding a gun, they say in the news! You gotta help me, I fear for my life!
— Max Payne, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
It's nice to see that criticism isn't just for movies and video games. Bloody opera - corrupting our kids...
—Assassin's Creed III's Animus Database on The Beggar's Opera
"But you can't!" Anna cried. "I refuse to be a part of Canon's evil plan!"
I frowned. "What are you talking about? What plan?"
"Television!" she said. "Millions of sets in homes throughout the United States of America. And beamed to them all, weekly serials filled with gratuitous action scenes, plot cliches, lousy continuity, non-existent character development, and women with large breasts in highly revealing costumes!"
— The Last Kiss Goodbye, a Star Trek: Voyager uber parody.
"They're using it to spread fake news! It's making people depressed and lonely! Teens are losing their minds, they're obsessed with it! Of course, I'm talking about the printing press!"
Real Life
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions. The new media are not ways of relating us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
We've got to nip this Internet thing in the bud...
— Attributed to both Sen. James Exon and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, circa 1996
Any new media or industry that grows rapidly is going to be criticized. That's just because the older, more established media have been around, and a lot of adults can be very conservative. They may not have an open mind to new things that weren't around when they were growing up, and are replacing the things they grew up with... over the years I've seen this standard image of a child playing a video game in which the child is alone in a darkened room, with his face very close to the TV, with the light of the TV reflecting off his face, holding the controller and just staring at the TV. I'd really like to be able to change that image of video games into something that's a little more positive.
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet'. They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans over a cup of tea.
The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
—Julian Assange (yes, that one)
In the old days when everyone played with, I don't know, wooden pegs, kids couldn't wait to do their homework!
— Charlie Brooker, Gameswipe on video game addiction
I think I checked Twitter four minutes after all my kids were born. 'Hey, nice baby. OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS TYPO IN THE CABLE GUIDE LOL!
They used to hate all the internet. And then they learned that they could could pictures of breasts on it, and now they only hate social media. 'Social Websites Melt Children's Brains', which is kinda ironic, because the Daily Mail melts old people's brains.
—Martin Robbins, "Why the Daily Mail is Evil"
His name was Jamie Kellner, and he was the new Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Turner Broadcasting Systems [who] stirred up a hornet's nest when he stated, in a 2002 interview, that personal video recorders like TiVo, which allowed viewers to skip commercials, were tantamount to stealing from the networks. If folks didn't watch the commercials that the networks aired, he reasoned, they therefore wouldn't buy any products, and if they didn't buy any products, advertisers would stop paying for future commercials. Strangely, Kellner did not go on a crusade against the remote control.
—R. D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez, The Death of WCW
I love this dude who is, as Judd Nelson describes him, a “hot weapons” dealer. Not only does he smuggle his guns by duct-taping them to the insides of arcade machine cabinets, but he’s also the prototypical version of the ’90s long-haired scumbag bad guy on every episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. I just love that this thriving criminal empire is contingent on the continued existence of arcades. Out of curiosity, how many arcades do you think were accidentally blown up when he tried to pack hand grenades into DanceDanceRevolution machines?
To put things into perspective, the movie Pan's Labyrinth came out the same year as Rule of Rose. Both are quite similar: they star little girls that have to live in unnatural conditions (the Spanish Civil War, an orphanage) and who escape in a world of make-believe that is potentially even worse than their reality. In either case, whether or not the supernatural elements are real is open to interpretation. Pan's Labyrinth received Oscars and its director went on to direct Hollywood blockbusters. Rule of Rose was mostly ignored and the only notoriety is has received was for allegedly being violent kiddie porn. It's hard not to see this as a case study for how unfairly games are treated in mainstream media.
The fact that games are a threat to traditional media is why they’re constantly being marginalized by the mainstream. And this marginalization explains why we have so many pathetic editorials by game journalists and industry spokespeople who try to find ways to 'legitimize' gaming in the eyes of the media and make it more 'inclusive', 'mainstream', and 'accepted'. They don’t get it. They don’t understand that it’s a war, and videogames and the new media are winning big time. Calling videogames artistically illegitimate, childish, etc. is the only weapon of the old media, besides lobbying for games to be classified as dangerous killing simulators.
I've read newspaper articles written in the day that said that doctors were concerned that ragtime (the music genre) was a public health hazard, that it would cause heart palpitations, these... uneven rhythms and it would mess with your brain and make you insane.
Hitler would have loved social media. It’s the most powerful marketing tool an extremist could ever hope for because by design social media reflects a narrow worldview filtering out anything that challenges our beliefs while constantly validating our convictions and amplifying our deepest fears.
Just a while ago, mullahs from many places of the middle East denounced the Pokémon (the children's videogame) because they affirmed that is about a Japanese word that means "I'm Jewish". A Saudi cleric contributed the "Pokémon craze" to a "Jewish plot designed to force our little ones to renounce their faith and values, as well as distract them from more important things like scientific aspirations." The licentious little icons - and I don't mean the mullahs - earned a fatwa.
— Irshad Manji, The trouble with Islam today, chapter 5.
