In 1645, the English Long Parliament banned Christmas because it was seen as a Catholic plot to encourage sin and sensual delights. The ban was more observed in its breach. By 1656, parliamentarians were complaining that they were being kept awake by the sounds of Christmas parties next to their lodgings!
Parliaments remain in the business of responding to panicked moral outrages with ineffective laws. Just in the last month the Australian Parliament whipped itself into a frenzy over the social media use of young people.
The last week of this year’s Parliament resembled the mad rush of last-minute Christmas shoppers. A “world-leading” Bill to ban under 16s from using social media was released on a Thursday. Australians were given 24 hours to make a submission by Friday – and despite the tight deadline an astounding 15,000 people did so. On the Monday, a Senate hearing was held. On the Tuesday, the Senate report was released. On the Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Bill. And, on the Thursday, the Senate rushed the Bill through with just a few hours of debate.
It remains a mystery why politicians can’t seem to act with such alacrity to approve major, job-creating investments or cut government spending. If we can establish a social media ban in a week, why does it take more than ten years to approve the average mine?
Because it was introduced with such haste there is no doubt that the social media ban will be about as ineffective as the 17th century ban on Christmas. Soon we will hear from our modern-day puritans bemoaning that children and parents are simply ignoring the diktat of their parliamentarian betters and that something more draconian must be done to enforce the will of parliament.
Our current panic over ‘misinformation’ and new forms of media is not that dissimilar from the ‘pamphlet wars’ of the 1600s. That century saw the rise of the printing press to enable distribution of controversial and blasphemous materials to the masses.
Two years before the Long Parliament banned Christmas, they passed ‘An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing’. That law made people seek government approval to distribute a pamphlet.
The rationale was to suppress ‘the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and Government.’
In other words, the Long Parliament wanted to control ‘misinformation’. History today is repeating as our modern-day nobility panic over their loss of control through the rise of social media.
The rise of podcasts and newsletters is putting an end to the staid, 10 second soundbites of the nightly news. Those that have used and profited from this system are aghast at this but it is much better that young people now regularly listen to in-depth hours long podcasts on detailed topics.
After Donald Trump’s successful use of the format it will now probably become a requirement that any candidate for high office sits for a podcast style examination.
That’s a good thing. The internet revolution means change and that is off putting but there is a lot that is positive about it. We should resist the puritan urge to just ban it and instead learn to live with the internet and direct it towards better things.
