I'm sure everyone who's reading this has seen at least one article decrying television or video games as the death of intelligent communication/interaction. What I'm curious about is if this is a new cultural trend or have new forms of communication always been met with similar resistance?
All of them. Every single form of communication, or interaction has been condemned at one point or another. Here are some examples:
Several Greek and Egyptian scholars decried writing, claiming that being able to write things down would cause peoples memories to atrophy from disuse.
Many newspapers claimed the telegraph destroyed journalistic writing.
Television has been met resistance from its very inception. Hollywood blamed it for the fall of the Studio System (it wasn't). It took the US government to win an antitrust lawsuit which resulted in studios dumping their old films onto the small screen.
Tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons were blamed for promoting satanism and devil worship.
In 1976, Bill Gates himself wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists attacking computer hobbyists for pirating his BASIC software, claiming that it would lead to the death of software programming.
And Home Taping is Killing Music! in the 80s...
"This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here. Now, that is where the problem is...We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine."
That's Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA during the 70s. Can you guess what horrible new device he claimed would destroy the entire film and television industries overnight? The VCR.
And now my personal favorite:
Player Pianos, and the Piano Rolls that ran them were the first examples of a mass produced musical "recording". At the time, the music industry consisted solely of producers of sheet music, and as you can imagine, saw this as a major threat to their income. Not only did they demand a ban on piano rolls, and player pianos, they also demanded that they 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. This wasn't a small deal either, this had backing from the likes of John Philip Sousa who claimed:
"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."