This is a popular rebuttal and I don’t think that it’s a good one.
The detrimental effects of the media forms you’ve listed are better considered in ways other than through events that themselves are (ironically) pop culture tropes today (moral panic over music, the “war of the worlds” panic myth).
It’s hard to even compare technology as pervasive as AI, smartphones and social media to TV and music (which are pervasive in their own right by definition, but not so much by comparison). The former is capable of subsuming and manipulating the forms of the latter and its effects are far more direct than the latter’s in respect to the present age.
The detrimental effects of the media forms you’ve listed are better considered in ways other than through events that themselves are (ironically) pop culture tropes today (moral panic over music, the “war of the worlds” panic myth).
It’s hard to even compare technology as pervasive as AI, smartphones and social media to TV and music (which are pervasive in their own right by definition, but not so much by comparison). The former is capable of subsuming and manipulating the forms of the latter and its effects are far more direct than the latter’s in respect to the present age.