To the extent that these episodes do represent a genuine moral panic rather than a simple diversion for the simple, they follow a familiar pattern. Some have compared them to the Salem witch hysteria, and many of my conservative friends, noting the political advantage-seeking in many of these exercises, invoke the Red Scare. But what they most closely resemble is the Christian fundamentalist and social-conservative panic over heavy metal and rap music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a well-heeled inquisition in which Tipper Gore played Torquemada. No intellectually serious and mentally healthy adult (sorry, Tipper) ever thought that Judas Priest songs were going to lead to Jim Jones-style mass suicide scenes in America’s shopping malls or that Ice-T was the man behind the crack-era crime wave. They just didn’t like having their kids listen to that music, which was considered to be what our British friends would describe as “naff.” The low-minded and superstitious believed, and the cynical political opportunists (sorry, Tipper) pretended to believe, that there was a species of magic afoot, that uttering certain words would bring certain infernal realities into the world, as though Ozzy Osbourne were an actual real-world wizard. It’s pretty funny in retrospect: The ranting Chet version of this Twisted Sister presented in videos of the era was an exaggeration, but only a little one.
Social media, by instantly connecting millions of insignificant people to one another (“insignificant” isn’t a moral judgment; it’s just how things are) has created a Grand Canyon of an echo chamber in which that echoing insignificance has become enveloping and inescapable, and intolerable to those trapped in the middle of it. People with the opportunity to say whatever they want to say to anybody they want to say it to discover (even if they will not admit it to themselves) that they do not have anything of interest to say.
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