[New Wave] The Cost of Fear Toward Innovative Phenomena

Historically, new phenomena have often been sources of fear and terror for people. Even sages with different cognitive abilities from ordinary people seemed unable to escape this. Socrates, who laid the foundation of Western philosophy, is said to have lamented that people's memory would weaken due to the newly popularized writing at the time. Therefore, he did not publish any books with his own thoughts written down. However, the reason many modern people can remember Socrates' achievements is thanks to the very writing he disliked so much.

If even sages were affected, it goes without saying that busy people trying to make a living were even more so. There was also the Luddite movement in the early 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was rapidly progressing, which destroyed machines claiming that textile machines would take away people's jobs. Historically, it is hard to imagine productivity improving innovatively and the overall living standards of humanity rising without the role of machines, and such machines even created new jobs and occupations that had never existed before.

Since then, excessive fear and terror toward new phenomena have continued. New media such as radio, TV, comic books, rock music, computers, the Internet, and smartphones were feared to degrade the cognitive abilities of growing adolescents and increase violent behavior. However, there is no objective evidence anywhere that such concerns have actually materialized. On the contrary, thanks to these technologies, our society has been able to carry out school classes and company work without disruption even in the sudden non-face-to-face society caused by COVID-19, communicating daily with friends who are far away and living without incident.

What if humanity, gripped by fear and terror of novelty, had banned writing, restricted machines, and monitored the production and distribution of new media content? No one would think they would live in a happy world free from fear and terror. Rather, in unpredictable situations like the COVID pandemic, wouldn't they have lived with even greater fear and terror due to the lack of means to respond actively?

It has been over a month since the youth game shutdown system, intended to protect adolescents' right to sleep and prevent game addiction, was abolished after nearly a decade. There is no evidence or report anywhere that adolescents are not sleeping and that game addiction has worsened to become a social problem. They are just using games well and living without issue. Just like writing and machines.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which was the main government agency responsible for the youth game shutdown system, is at the center of the issue to the extent that its continuation or abolition is being debated as a campaign pledge of the 20th presidential candidates. Of course, it is difficult to say this is solely because of the shutdown system, but no one can deny that the shutdown system was a factor that intensified this issue. The main government agency was driven to a situation where it was the one being shut down while insisting on a policy to shut down games played by children for a few hours.

Groundless fear and terror toward games are still ongoing. Many organizations that argued for maintaining the shutdown system during discussions on its abolition are also those pushing for the game addiction disease code. And I understand that discussions on introducing the disease code are still ongoing. If a game addiction disease code contrary to the flow of the times is introduced, the responsible government agency will face harsher judgment than the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. This is based on the historical context of what reactions to innovation have caused.

Lee Jang-ju, author of ‘How to Communicate with Children of the Game Generation’ · Director of Irak Digital Culture Research Institute

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.