![]() ![]() I take for granted technologies that people in earlier generations were very anxious about.” It also puts some of the fears that people like me sometimes have about these devices in perspective. “I wanted to really hammer home that it’s not just with the rise of the internet and digital media and walking around with devices like smartphones that people suddenly become paranoid about technologies,” Knapp says. ![]() “They have trouble understanding how I could feel anxious about them,” he says, which makes for good class discussions. So who’s being paranoid now? To his students, digital technologies are simply a given. Earlier generations, he says, were concerned when radio and television were introduced, fearing that the devices might be spying on them.ĭuring an interview on Zoom, Knapp holds up a small Post-it note-it’s what he uses to cover his computer camera when not using it. Knapp understands how that paranoia can take hold. ![]() “There’s a long history of new technologies being greeted with fear.” Is That Camera Looking at Me? It is important “to historicize the idea of paranoia and conspiracy,” he says, and that often includes new technology. “I think some of the connections he made in terms of very early American history were new to the students.” ” “He takes a broad historical approach and connects it to early points in American history,” Knapp says. One key text is Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “ The Paranoid Style in American Politics. S tudents learned through the texts that paranoia “is an inherent part of our political culture,” says Knapp, “not necessarily a phenomenon of the left or the right, although paranoia runs rampant in contemporary right-wing conspiracy culture, and indeed this was one of the inspirations for the course.” The class readings help round out the understanding of the issues at hand. “P aranoia really flourished in genres like 1950s science fiction as well as 1970s conspiracy thrillers,” Knapp says. The films begin with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and work forward through the likes of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) all the way to The Matrix (1999) and Citizenfour, the 2014 documentary about Edward Snowden’s leaks of highly classified information from the National Security Agency, which revealed global surveillance programs. Aimed at students who major in film and media studies, the class includes a weekly screening of a movie that embodies the longstanding strain of paranoia in America. That’s what led him to create the course Screening Paranoia, which debuted in fall 2022. But paranoia has been a feature of American life for a lot longer than we realize, says Jonathan Knapp, a lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Program. Now might seem like an especially ripe time to be paranoid-from conspiracy theories to actual conspiracies (think January 6), not to mention digital surveillance that is sometimes Orwellian. ![]()
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