http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewMediaAreEvil

a porn highway to hell. If your children want to get on the internet, don't let them. It's only a matter of time before they get sucked into a vortex of shame, drugs, and pornography from which they'll never recover. The internet: It's just not worth it." Citizens United Negating Technology For Life And Peoples' Safety, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories "The internet may appear new and fun, but it's really. If your children want to get on the internet, don't let them. It's only a matter of time before they get sucked into a vortex of shame, drugs, and pornography from which they'll never recover. The internet: It's just not worth it."

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There's always going to be The New Rock & Roll, that new fad or thing that causes whippersnappers to act all crazy and wild like they've all gone bonkers. Typically, this is a fringe phenomenon, and political and religious radicals will be bewailing the development while the media just reports on it.

At other times, though, the negative press goes far beyond basic opinions and phenomena that we can document on camera. Speculation goes on that devious things are afoot. When this goes too far, a reporter is at risk of spouting "New media are evil!" Otherwise-rational people faced with uncertainty about what the New Media is actually like decide that  just to be safe or to grab some attention  they should go with the most inflammatory, headline-grabbing description they can come up with.

The motivation to demonize a medium can go much deeper than the desire of the media itself to make headlines. In our giant, pan-corporate world, there's a good chance that some news outlets are owned by a guy who owns a major recording label. All of a sudden HQ's interest in stories about devious pirating activities becomes quite noticeable. To an audience generally uninformed about what the New Media is like to begin with, whether or not the story is true is irrelevant: the ring of truth is what becomes important.

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Bear in mind that the impression given can largely be due to ignorance, the Cowboy BeBop at His Computer misstep taken by someone who is already predisposed to distrust this "Cowboy Bebop" character in the first place.

Take the Internet as an example; though it has come to dominate our lives today, it had a much greater mystique in The '90s when it first became mainstream. People taking up professions in the media industry as a career and most of the people involved today still don't have a full grasp on what the Internet is, so when the assumption is that It's a Small Net After All, all of a sudden every little instance of graphic pornography or 4chan vandalism ends up speaking for the Internet as a whole. New Media Are Evil decreases a great deal once the industry and society have adjusted to major technological advances and sees them as the norm. In other words, when the Medium stops being New, it stops being Evil.

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This is by no means limited to the Internet, although the sheer density of information we receive today can make it seem that way. Almost every new medium of communication or expression that has appeared since the dawn of history has been accompanied by doomsayers and critics who have confidently predicted that it would bring about The End of the World as We Know It by weakening the brain or polluting our precious bodily fluids.

The same thing has happened to basically every type of media in history, making this trope as old as mankind itself. Writing itself was hugely suspicious for example, as people feared that it would cripple the ability to memorise things, as this was now no longer needed as everything could be written down.

Sometimes the doomsaying has a kernel of truth. New media do change old media, sometimes for a net loss of quality in art or information. Most often, though, the new medium allows a new freedom from the old medium that makes for more opportunity. This is Older Than They Think, as you can see from the very first examples.

Supertrope to Social Media Is Bad. See also: murder.com, Everything Is Online, Clickbait Gag, There Should Be a Law, TV Never Lies, You Can Panic Now, Books vs. Screens, and Appeal to Tradition. The opposite usually ends with Old Media Playing Catch-Up. If books or other forms of written communication are portrayed as superior, it may also be an example of The Power of Language.

The inversion of this trope, when new media develop a similar attitude toward the old boys' club, is Old Media Are Evil.

Don't forget that Old Media was NEW back then.

Examples:

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Non-fictional examples:

Ancient Times

According to accounts recorded by his student Plato, Socrates was hostile toward writing (which, while not exactly new in his time, was still the latest medium to come down the pike). Essentially, Socrates claimed that putting an idea down in written form "killed" it by depriving it of a mind in which to "live", making it worthless. His argument can be found in a dialogue as... written in The Phaedrus (written by Plato, we should note; Socrates left no texts). This, of course, makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.

as... written in The Phaedrus (written by Plato, we should note; Socrates left no texts). This, of course, makes this trope Older Than Feudalism. Besides that, Plato himself, in his specifications for the perfect state, included censorship of poetry in case it introduced subversive ideas.

Something similar, though not quite as old: The Jewish Torah, according to tradition, has two parts to it, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. The Written Torah makes up the first five books of what we know as the Tanach, Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, whereas the Oral Torah eventually became the Mishnah and Talmud. For many centuries there was a strong directive to keep the oral Torah... well, oral. The point was that people were meant to memorize, discuss, and generally learn it out loud, and so keep it on the tip of their tongue. Writing was well and good for the general tenets, but not the specific details. However, it was later recognized that, what with exile, massacres, and the contemporary Roman Empire systematically hunting down all ordained rabbis (who, as their final exam, had to know the entire oral Torah letter-perfect) the whole memorization thing wasn't going very well, so the Mishnah (and later, its expansion the Talmud) was formalized in writing in around 200 AD.

An Egyptian Pharaoh protested that the ability to write things down would inevitably result in his subjects' memories atrophying from disuse.

Early Christians also tried to resist the introduction of punctuation and spaces between words into the Bible, because they thought that not having to parse words and sentences in your head made reading too easy. note Ancient Greek was written without spaces and punctuation, instead using the word "KAI", meaning "and", to indicate breaks in thought.

Solon was very displeased upon seeing the formerly all chorus Athenian Theater get actors added to it. He even asked the first actor if he's not ashamed of lying in front of so many people. Sometime later, he made a theater reference upon seeing Peisistratos pulling off a Wounded Gazelle Gambit.

In The Gallic Wars Caesar wrote about one Germanic tribe that despised writing, on the belief that writing makes people (and specifically their memory) lazy.

Medieval Europe

Some medieval Catholic theologians railed against the printing press, declaring it a creation of the devil, mostly because, as it grew widespread, its most popular uses both undercut the Church's authority: the mass production of The Bible in the local language instead of Latin (which broke the Church's monopoly on interpretation of Scripture), and the distribution of the works of Luther and other Protestant reformers (which threatened the Church, period). It is interesting to note that the reasons they gave for their opposition to the printing press was its efficiency — it could produce almost perfect copies of any given work... And everyone knows that since perfection isn't human, it must be the devil who's making it possible. (Which of course is theologically silly even if you accept the Insane Troll Logic because the devil isn't perfect either. If the Insane Troll Logic is sound, it must be God who made the printing press.)

It may come as a surprise, but European musical polyphony is a relatively recent invention, dating back only to the middle ages. It was, of course, immediately viewed by some as fundamentally immoral (because it made it impossible to understand the lyrics), and on those grounds, Pope John XXII banned polyphonic music in 1322 — by some accounts simply from liturgical use, by other accounts entirely. Later, after it stopped being new, another pope overturned the ban. Of course, it helped having music introduced by de Palestrina and others which was both polyphonic and comprehensible.

Around the 13th century, Chess was considered a game of the devil, and forks were a devil's instrument. The fork argument makes some sort of sense; it looks like a pitchfork, and the devil loves those. But chess? Some also believed that it encouraged gambling and were offended that it allowed commoners to kill kings. note Allegedly, that's the reason even today, chess only allows forcing the king into surrender. It contains forks. note Those not familiar with chess terminology, moving a piece so it threatens two of the opponent's pieces in such a way they are forced to save only one and likely sacrifice the other is called "forking". The idea that chess encouraged gambling became such a prevalent thought because people used dice to make sure the game went faster, the church found gambling to be a devil's thing. According to some sources, dice wer used to determine who makes the next move, making the game luck based, but the familiar no-randomness form was fully acceptable. In 1254, King Louis IX (the holy one) forbade his siblings to play the game of chess. The promotion was also seen as controversial because it allowed every pawn to be promoted into a queen. Since the queen was the king's wife it would mean that a king could have more than one wife and the idea of even someone being able to have more than one wife was considered to be a perverted thought at the time as people were firmly rooted into Christian faith. note In its Persian root the queen is a minister. Thus, the pawn gets a promotion. Similarly, bishops originally were war elephants, but that's another story. It also came to Europe from Persia—a Muslim country. (Check Mate is from Sha-Mat, Persian for "the king is dead.") The fact that the Queen is the most powerful piece was also controversial in some cultures for being unfeminine or emasculating the King. Alternate, gender-neutral titles like "the King's advisor" were used for the piece until the 15th century (see note about Persia, above).



1600s

The moral panic against reading novels has been around for centuries before being replaced by newer media. One of the earliest examples is a central plot point in Don Quixote, where the main character goes mad from reading too much chivalry novels, and believes he is a knight himself. During this time, it was believed reading could cause gout, catarrhs, wasting, indigestion, colick, crudities, vertigo, consumption, and wind (according to dr. Robert Burton).

1700s

The word "novel", meaning a story, comes from the older meaning of "something new and unfamiliar". Before the 1600 people publishing fiction tried to dress up embellished legends as true history (e.g. the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood) or obvious and deliberate allegory (e.g. Utopia), but improvements in literacy, trade, and communications created a market for entertaining fictional stories set in the present day. In England during the 18th-century novel-reading became widespread, with many novels being specifically targeted at women, and this triggered a slow-motion moral panic that lasted for much of the century.

1800s/1900s/Turn-of-the-20th-Century

As the telegraph began to allow rapid communication across the globe, some newspaper editors complained that it was destroying the art of journalistic writing. Instead of spending days or weeks on a story, reporters had to write quickly while the news was still new.

The invention of the telephone not only prompted screeds bemoaning the impending death of literacy (because no one would need to write letters anymore), it also prompted widespread panic among law enforcement agencies, who realized that it allowed criminal gangs to conspire and plan crimes without having to meet in person, from the privacy of their own homes. According to some accounts, there were actually a few abortive attempts to outlaw the telephone for this reason (sound familiar?); instead, cooler minds prevailed, and wiretapping was developed instead. "The Hacker Crackdown", by Bruce Sterling, goes into great detail about turn-of-the-century anxieties about what the telephone meant for society and draws a parallel with the early online networks. In the film Kinsey, Alfred Kinsey, Sr preaches that it promotes lust, allowing a girl to hear the voice of her suitor on the pillow next to her. Or, of course, phone sex.

Piano rolls  long scroll-like rolls of paper coded with holes in them for use in player pianos  were the first medium for cheaply making mass-produced "recordings" of music. At the time they were invented, the music industry was composed solely of publishers of sheet music. Predictably, these publishers saw the sales of pre-recorded performances as a major threat to their income, and lobbied the Congress (Parliament/Senate) of the American Union to not only ban piano rolls and player pianos, but to pass a law requiring any new system for music reproduction be subject to a veto from a collective association made up of all the music publishers. Congress didn't give in to their demands and instead created the "mechanical license" system. But not before the 19th-century equivalent of the RIAA trotted John Phillip Sousa before Congress to declare apocalyptically: These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Not long after Piano rolls came the phonograph, which could record any sound, not just piano music. The musical establishment predictably threw an even bigger fit, fearing that recorded music would drive live musicians to extinction and deny them proper compensation for their work. No one, apparently, realized that musicians would still be needed to record the music, and would become even more in demand as records allowed them to sell their music to more people than ever before.

Supposedly, there was an initiative in Congress during the early 1900s to ban jazz music because it was "a bad influence". In Belgium there was, oddly enough, no moral panic against it  jazz was actually embraced. This was probably due to the fact that Belgium had barely had any native culture of its own at that point (most popular Belgian music that was not jazz was foreign, usually French for the Walloons and Dutch for the Flemish) and the fact that a few very important jazz revolutions occurred on Belgian soil (such as the invention of the saxophone). The Belgian government of the time was eager to fund anything that was even the slightest bit nationalistic.

Radio: It didn't matter that some European governments strictly regulated their own radio stations (the Irish government banned jazz, with a ludicrously broad definition of what "jazz" was) when Radio Luxembourg could broadcast sinful music all across Europe. In hindsight, you only have to bear in mind that the RTL group nowadays calls itself as the biggest mass media outlet in entire Europe to know that all that sinful music made them have lots of fame and money long before they expanded their business to television. Also, early BBC announcers couldn't read out the result of sports events until about 7 AM in order not to hurt sales of evening newspapers. The idea that the Orson Welles' version of The War of the Worlds genuinely caused panic appears to be a rumour made up by newspapers to discredit radio.

Certain genres of novels were blamed for corrupting the youth  e.g., suggesting to young women that eloping with mysterious strangers was a good idea.

This era also produced the most spectacular aversion of this trope, formulated by Wolfgang Riepl in his 1913 work Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Römer. Known as Riepl's Law, it states that: New, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.

The notion that Pinball games were entirely based on luck led to many cities banning them around the middle of the 20th century, on the grounds that they led to delinquency and gambling. A ban in New York City stood for over thirty years and was only lifted when writer Roger Sharpe appeared in court and gave a demonstration of precise aiming skills.

The introduction of modern postal services in the 1850s, as explained by Cracked, led to paranoia in Victorian Britain and America. It was feared that the private, secure communication it offered would lead to the collapse of morality in women, as they could get into "clandestine correspondence with unprincipled men" and turn into whores. The last name of the British postal system's creator, Anthony Trollope (who himself got caught up in this moral panic), is still recognized as an old-timey synonym for "prostitute". A series of quotes in this xkcd comic highlights this by a series of quotations that wouldn't be entirely out of place when talking about modern-day texting, but are all about people writing letters to each other.

by Cracked, led to paranoia in Victorian Britain and America. It was feared that the private, secure communication it offered would lead to the collapse of morality in women, as they could get into "clandestine correspondence with unprincipled men" and turn into whores. The last name of the British postal system's creator, Anthony Trollope (who himself got caught up in this moral panic), is still recognized as an old-timey synonym for "prostitute". Thomas Edison claimed that the Rise of the Talkies ruined cinema, arguing that, because screen actors had started concentrating on their voices, they'd forgotten how to act. By his logic, apparently the stage (which far predated film) had never produced any actors worth a damn.

Averted for radio in Saudi Arabia; the king assembled a group of religious leaders, then had someone read the Quran over the radio. The assembled leaders agreed that any form of technology which allowed accurate transmission of the Holy Book was permissible.

The Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog, as part of the revolution it brought to retail, also laid some important early cracks in the Jim Crow segregation of the rural Deep South by undermining its economic control over black sharecroppers, allowing them to buy goods through the mail on credit without having to go through local, highly segregated general stores. Needless to say, this did not endear the company to many segregationists. Their mail-order competitor Montgomery Ward (which only took cash and didn't let people buy on credit, and thus catered to middle-class white customers) paid people to spread rumors that Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck were either black or mixed-race in order to discredit them, and many general stores would refuse to sell stamps to black people to let them buy the Sears, Roebuck catalog — leading the company to put instructions in the catalog on how to ask the post office for it directly.

1945 to 1988

1989 to Present

Fictional examples:

Advertising

Hulu's hilarious ad campaign features celebrities from NBC and FOX shows (Alec Baldwin, Seth MacFarlane, Eliza Dushku, and now Denis Leary) admitting that television does, in fact, rot your brain, and that Hulu will rot it even more due to its convenience. They then admit that they are aliens who want to drink your liquefied brain mass.

Anime & Manga

Serial Experiments Lain focuses on a strange, distorted and malevolent version of the internet called The Wired. Though notably it also explores the positive side; Lain remains connected to her loved ones because the Wired continues to exist, in the end. The evils of the Wired are largely related to the issue of how an expert information manipulator can use misinformation and people's desires to elevate himself into an object of religious worship.

Xxx Holic has a more sympathetic/realistic example of this trope: one of Yuuko's customers is a housewife who is spending all of her time on the internet, to the exclusion of everything else, including her family, and Yuuko ends up smashing her computer... though she notes that it was all up to the housewife; that she should do what she wants to do, not what her family want her to do. She even notes that if the housewife really wants to go back online, there's nothing preventing her from just buying another computer.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: When Itoshiki Nozomu realizes that the Cute Mute of his class, who is only able to communicate through text messages, is actually a Troll, the kind of person who badmouths him on the internet but then behaves politely in every-day life so he cannot get angry at them, he summarizes this trope as the conclusion: Nozomu: I'm in despair! The internet has left me in despair!

Bakuman。 doesn't explicitly say that the internet is bad, but every time it comes into play, it's portrayed in a negative light; First when Smug Snake Nanamine attempts to create a popular manga via online committee, and then again when internet-goers catch wind of Mashiro and Azuki's marriage plans, leading to a massive backlash and wave of hate that jeopardizes Azuki's chance of getting the female lead VA role on Reversi.

A more balanced, less obvious example: the antagonist of the second season of K is a King who builds an app that allows users to get powers from him without actually meeting him (as the other Kings require, since they recruit their Clansmen personally) or even being aware of Kings and the Slates from which they get their powers. As such, he has a much larger base of fighters, who operate mostly anonymously. Jungle "missions" (taken on for points that can be collected to gain greater powers) include basically trolling the other Clans, as well as planting small things like fake fruit and plushies in public locations - that have bombs inside. Or distracting all of the employees in a mall so that a robbery can be committed. Or helping a higher-ranking member get past security into a school so that they can try to kill someone inside. So really, he's weaponized the the dark side of internet society. However, the core members aren't shown as bad people, and it's not the technology that made them do bad things - one of the main characters is an expert hacker who infiltrates Jungle and is instrumental in stopping them from destroying the world .

Comic Books

A Scooby-Doo comic once used as villains a gang of counterfeiters who were staging the haunted house masquerade to cover for their true operation... making counterfeit cassette recordings of popular music bands, which they would then supply to unscrupulous music stores.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:Century by Alan Moore as it continued started showing off some Author Tract on this subject. Starting within the pages of The Black Dossier and Century 1969, the world of the League started being portrayed in a more pessimistic and problematic way than it had before. Alan Moore in his views takes on that a lot of human culture isn't challenging or advancing as much as it should be. His on-page treatments of James Bond and Harry Potter shown off this criticism. Bond's original book attitude was turned Up to Eleven with his whole premise being mocked by revealing him to be both incompetent and not even loyal to the crown. Potter was made into actually being the Antichrist and his world was accused of having been stolen from older, better literature and being full of Plot Holes. Moore later attempted to clarify some of this in interviews in which while he does view, for example, Harry Potter to be a less challenging and safer work than, say, Performance he doesn't hold that all modern culture is a nadir. This however raised more questions as given from the 1960s onward the world of the League features less and less literary characters period. note There remains an argument that the literary or written down versions of drama and oral tales by their very format should be judged as less restrictive than film or acted out drama and tales. This viewpoint argues if we were to say British fiction is worse today than the Victorian era we compare the books of then to the books of now instead of the books of then to the films of now and etc. However Moore's League has been open to all fiction but as of late uses far more British film or television references than book references. This has led some to find Moore's comparisons a bit unbalanced. So while we know Moore doesn't indict everyone with this trope, it's hard to know who he would cite as an aversion.

Supergirl story arc "Good-Looking Corpse" has a guy launch an attack on the entire DCU metahuman community by creating a Foursquare-esque smartphone app for people to post metahuman sightings so villains can then track them down and attack them.

This was brought back as a gag in Batgirl story "The Darkest Reflection", where common criminals mapped out the various Gotham vigilantes so they knew when to lay low (Truth in Television as people have attempted to do this against pedophiles).

In Runaways, to prevent the Runaways from going to the police to reveal their evil plans, evil organization "Pride" frames one of them for murder, using the MMO he was playing as justification for why he may have done it.

In DCeased the Anti-Life virus is widespread through the use of the internet and cell phones, with 600 million people being affected almost instantly.

Comic Strips

The Dick Tracy newspaper comic did a story arc where they essentially shilled for the RIAA, portraying people who pirate movies and music as not only being literal thieves (they beat up guards and steal stuff out of warehouses so they can... make bootleg copies of it), but equivalent to drug dealers, including making ridiculous, over-the-top new villain characters in the style of characters like Babyface to represent internet piracy. It even included panic-mongering in the form of notes to parents that "If your kids download music, you can pay the price!" with an image of a cop car zooming up to a house with its siren running, presumably so the cops can kick in the door and slam the parents to the floor, handcuffing them and hauling them right to jail because their daughter downloaded "Slave 4 U". (Of course, all indications are that the guy writing these comics is completely and totally insane at this point, but being the RIAA's henchgoon is just a new twist.)

In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin's dad refuses to buy a VCR because "It's bad enough we have a TV." Of course, that probably has more to do with Calvin's taste in programming and tendency to watch at all hours than any inherent hate of the medium itself. In one of his notes, Watterson himself called TV "the favorite drug of the 20th Century". To further drive the point home, Calvin has notably never had a single video game console, and his father stated the same thing about VCRs about computers and the internet (which was in its infancy during the strip's run). He also believes transportation should have stopped with the bicycle and rants about too many choices at the supermarket. Watterson has made none-too-subtle attacks on comic books— or at least The Dark Age of Comic Books, which was in full swing at the time— where they are portrayed as absurdly violent and bloody. This attitude was mocked in a Sunday strip, where Calvin reads Dark Age send-up comic book that ends with the '90s Anti-Hero getting his spine violently shattered by a villainess's ray gun. Visibly rattled from the intensity, he leaves to watch something on television, only for his mom to turn it off and tell him to read something because "there's too much violence on TV".

Mary Worth would like you all to know that if you use the internet, you will fall in love with a criminal, be deceived by someone pretending to bray your long lost child, and have your identity stolen. Facebook is not to be trusted!

Candorville has it both ways — the anthropomorphized "Mainstream Media" is a loudmouth and a fearmonger, but "The Internet" is paranoid and dubiously sane.

One Luann involves entirely unspecified fears. Luann's father: I read an article on what kids do these days on the Internet. It's scary.

Luann's mother: Do you think our daughter's doing something like that?

Fan Works

Films  Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

The song "Tu es nicht" by the German band "Die Ärzte" parodies this.

"Tele-Vee-Shun" by Stan Freberg, a calypso complaint about the power of the small screen.

Miranda Lambert's "Automatic" has traces of this: Hey, whatever happened to

Waiting your turn, doing it all by hand

'Cause when everything is handed to you

It's only worth as much as the time put in

It all just seemed so good the way we had it

Back before everything became automatic

Alan Jackson's "I Still Like Bologna" averts this. Throughout the song, he points out that he has no problem with technological advancement (specifically citing the joys of the Internet, cell phones, plasma TV, and so on), but says that there are still certain things that no amount of technology will replace: Well, I guess what I've been trying to say

This digital world is okay

It makes life better in a lot of ways

But it can't make the smell of spring

Or sunshine or lots of little things

We take for granted every day

Oh, and I still like bologna on white bread now and then

And the sound of a whippoorwill down a country road

The grass between my toes, that old sunset sinking low

And a good woman's love to hold me close

Arcade Fire does touch on this trope a few times, especially throughout their album "Reflektor" and in the song "Deep Blue", with the ending making this plea to the audience: Hey, put the cell phone down for a while,

Hey, put the laptop down for a while

Moby and the Void Pacific Choir made a song that may as well be the theme song of this entire trope, "Are You Lost in the World Like Me? ", which ironically was liked on Buzzfeed and YouTube quite a lot.

", which ironically was liked on Buzzfeed and YouTube quite a lot. Nightwish: "Noise" , the first single from 2020's Human. :||: Nature, is a fairly scathing critique of social media and cell phone addiction.

Pinball

Played with in a promotional comic for Bally's Space Invaders pinball machine. In the story, people who play the Space Invaders video game become enraptured by it to the point of ignoring everything else around them. On the other hand, the long lines of people who want to play the mesmerizing new Space Invaders pinball is treated as a curiosity.

In Crüe Ball, this is the initial excuse given by Craig for his crusade against Heavy Metal music.

Podcasts

Mystery Show: Starlee calls the Internet "every amateur sleuth's jealous, undermining best friend." It's a bit of Hypocritical Humor, though, because she uses the internet for research on several cases.

Pro Wrestling

Video Games

Web Animation

Napster Bad: A lot of shorts feature the characters complaining about the threat that this new "interweb" invention poses to life at large - specifically, the series was made to mock Metallica over their anti-piracy stance, back when pirate sites like Napster and Kazaa were all the rage.

Webcomics

Web Original

Web Videos

Having to be fully aware of the irony, Doug Walker had a rant in one of his The Legend of Korra vlogs about how the internet and iPhones make us scared to be alone.

To Boldly Flee viciously parodies this trope for all it's worth. A huge subplot is the impending government bill SUCKA, which is a satirizing of the SOPA bill. The government official trying to push it through and deliberately shut down internet reviews is named Lame R. Prick (the person who sponsored SOPA was named Lamar Smith), and he is ridiculously clueless as to how the internet and computers actually work (he tries to turn one on by smacking the monitor, and tells his assistant at one point "I only write Internet policy, I don't understand how it works!"). In the commentaries, the reviewers had a good bit to say about their time fighting against SOPA, and their opinions on whatever is coming next.

Western Animation