When a whistleblower from Facebook (now Meta), leaked the company’s research showing that Instagram was psychologically harmful to girls, newspapers and public commentary framed this as a revelation, but the story felt familiar.1 It seemed another example of a media panic, which many scholars explain have long been intertwined with moral panics.2 New media and media technologies—from the novel to social media—have traditionally generated familiar but slightly transformed and occasionally distinctive concerns about media effects. Such concerns typically revolve around age, gender, and race. But media is also essential to spreading moral and media panics. Reactions in the aftermath of the leaked Facebook documents are a perfect example of both—people expressed concerns about media’s impact and news media’s narrow focus on the documents’ more sensationally negative content exacerbated these concerns. Analysis of the so-called Facebook files focused on the revelations of harms of social media instead of other...
Editors’ Introduction: The Long History of Social Media Available to Purchase
Rebecca Wanzo is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, feminist theory, media studies, and comics and cartoon art. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (2020). Her work can also be found in journals such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences, Film Quarterly, Journal of Popular Culture, and in various edited collections.
Reem Hilu is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research is focused in the areas of feminist media history of computing and gaming. Her forthcoming book, The Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s (University of Minnesota Press, expected in 2024), examines how computing first spread into domestic spaces in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, focusing on those applications that mediated intimate and familial relationships in the home. Her work also appears in Velvet Light Trap and Camera Obscura.
Rebecca Wanzo, Reem Hilu; Editors’ Introduction: The Long History of Social Media. Feminist Media Histories 1 January 2024; 10 (1): 1–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.1
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