172 | Mass Media and Historical Change
to find fresh arguments to support their political legitimacy, and provided
opposition groups with fresh opportunities to speak out and thus challenge
existing powers.
All new media were frequently considered as dangerous and raised similar
anxieties as the computer and the Internet initially did. It was feared that they
would lead to addiction, nervousness and superficiality, especially among the
youth. At least computers and the Internet were not seen as posing a particular
danger to women, as had been the case with novels, cinema and radio. There
was also a long tradition of fear that people would lose their ability to differ-
entiate between reality and the world of the media. Equally characteristic was
the fear of negative effects on memory and attention span. Here the so-called
‘Third Person Effect’ comes into play: while many people believe themselves
to be in command of the situation when dealing with the new media, they
consider them dangerous for others, especially ‘the masses’.
Another reason why newly established media were perceived as threatening
lay in the fact that they accelerated communication and breached previous
forms of narrative. Newspapers, films and radio already symbolised fleeting
and concurrent forms of communication. In like manner the Internet was
considered to be incapable of examining contents calmly and straightfor-
wardly, allegedly losing itself in hectic snippets of information. Even so, there
were always counter-movements in media history: the early market for flyers
went hand in hand with the publication of great epics, the early short films led
to epic blockbusters, and the principle of serialisation on television lessened
the medium’s transient character. It may be assumed that future media inno-
vations will depict the Internet as unhurried, educational and socially consol-
idating in order to dramatise the perils of whatever new medium is emerging
at that time.
The ephemeral character of the Internet must also be seen in relation to its
storage capacity, which after all is an important media attribute. Accordingly,
the Internet as a transient medium represents the loss of cultural memory. Yet
here again a look at media history warns against too much cultural pessimism.
One can assume that digital storage capabilities are perhaps even better than
the capabilities of earlier media. It has often been deplored that only a fraction
of the pages have come down to us from the early days of the World Wide
Web, and email communication is not handed down. Compared with the first
decade of film, radio and television, however, this amount is so substantial that
it will provide future historians with ample research opportunities. Of course
not all emails and chat conversations are handed down. Yet they represent
such a surpassing number of sources compared to previous communication in
person or by telephone that historical scholarship can only profit from them.
Of course, this presupposes the discovery of an archiving system capable of
adequately registering electronic media sources and making them accessible.