Cultural changes breeds societal scrutiny

Cultural changes breeds societal scrutiny.

In Early Motion Pictures, Daniel Czitrom quotes Reverend Richard H. Edwards as saying:

"Why has the love of spontaneous play given way so largely to the love of

merely being amused?''

I believe his concern, as a cultural traditionalist, was with the decreasing use of parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums and the like for movies whichtook place in arcades, dance academies, vaudeville, dance halls and burlesque theaters. Such places were looked upon as the seamier side of life.

The growth of movies and other types of amusements was seen as a weakness and a cause for a shift in the values of American life.

In my opinion, this viewpoint occurs whenever something new is presented to our culture. In the 1960's, Elvis Presley's dancing was considered to be vulgar and seen as a corruptive force to teenages, same was seen with the Beatles, Heavy Metal and Hip Hop. The advent of the computer age has its own brand of criticism in that children, teens and even adults are thought to spend too much time online, in a virtual world. The web has a never ending supply of corruptive forces such as chat rooms, porn sites , to name a few.