For example: Jaws crashed the shark population and Sideways changed the popularity of 2 different Wines.
The first weekend of Pokemon Go was the closest we ever got to world peace.
and then it was used to train the war machine.
Somwhow, no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings, which basically invented modern fantasy.
This. You might have never read or seen LotR, but your idea of medieval fantasy is essentially LotR, I love a quote by Terry Pratchett:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
GNU Terry Pratchett
That’s a great quote, thank you!
your idea of medieval fantasie is essentially LotR
I mean yeah, because Tolking also just drew from his local fables and sagas. European Volktales are all about dwarfs, elves, creatues in the mountains, corruption, evil forces and lords, magic objects, wizards and brave knights, a royal house in trouble.
Just look at the Nibellung Tale. A pre christian gemanic tale
GNU Terry Pratchett
GNU Sir pTerry.
It’s a foundational work, but I’d argue that modern fantasy is more of a synthesis of LOTR and Conan the Barbarian.
The Jungle was a book about the meat packing industry in 1906. It detailed horrific treatment of the animals and disgusting unsanitary treatment of the meat products.
It led to public outrage and caused the Meat Inspection Act to be passed in the same year. That Act laid the foundation for modern health inspections in food facilities.
Notably it was only the poor treatment of the food that pissed people off. Sinclair meant to create sympathy for exploited workers, but no one actually cared about that part.
And Fast Food Nation turned me off meat for 6 months.
The 24 hour news cycle. It made the news dependent on ratings and turned into an entertainment medium to fill all of the extra hours. Before that, it was a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news at dinner time and at bedtime with snippets of news in the morning on things like the Today Show. CNN created a format, Fox added imaginary outrage, and things went downhill from there.
Outrage sells better than sex does.
The Hindenburg crash. If it weren’t for the newsreel, it would have been a unique airship crash and the airships would have continued to fly. But because it was shown in every theater as a newsreel for months, the interest in airship travel tanked and fleets were dismantled. It was actually a safe form of travel for the time. While tragic, only 35 people actually died, which is peanuts to a large air liner crash.
It’s actually crazy to me that cruise ships exist but cruise zeppelins don’t. You are telling me me there isn’t a market for a treetop rainforest cruise because of a crash from almost 100 years ago but people will still fly on a 737???
A cruise zeppelin could only work as an extreme luxury thing. A ship can carry tons of stuff, but a zeppelin is pretty limited, especially compared to the size of one.
For sure, it would be stupid expensive, it still surprises me that it nobody has tried it.
And 62 of the 97 survived. It blew my mind to learn that.
I will never forgive them for what they stole from us
I remember reading that most airships at the time used helium, but due to the war Germany had to use hydrogen instead. This is what made the hindenburg explode.
If they had used helium there wouldn’t have been any issue.
At the time the US was really the only country with helium and we wouldn’t sell it to them.
How about war of the worlds radio broadcast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
I would argue that Rainman (1988) being a lot of people’s first introduction to autism propped up the autistic savant trope
Hackers (1995) did not reflect reality at all, and entirely made up a look, sound and feel of hacker culture for the film. Tech press largely panned it as rediculous, unrealistic and innaccurate, but hacker culture actually morphed into something close to what was depicted in that film because it’s honestly way cooler and way better than what the actual hacker culture was at the time
Others have already pointed out really good examples like Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle which spawned a lot of food safety laws, or Wargames (1983) basically prompting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Edit to add: I also remembered another very influenctial author at the turn of the century was Henry George who wrote a now under-discussed book called Progress and Poverty which is widely credited for triggering the beginning of the Progressive Era
In a similar vein, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species basically kicked off the entire field of biology with the scientific theory of evolution
Bugs Bunny changed so much of the world you have no idea. Changed the diet of rabbits because he was making fun of a celebrity. Changed an obscure biblical character into a name for an idiot.
Dr Seuss changed the English language almost as much as Shakespeare.
Also, Shakespeare.
BioShock Infinite accidentally, and indirectly, caused a massive advancement in the animation industry.
Kung Fu Panda changed China’s movie industry.
Bugs Bunny took over the soviet Union after lenins death and all that followed. Lets not forget that episode “bugs bunny and the soviet Genosits!” Bugs Bunny wearing a Stalin Costume
A single piece of media, then Neuromancer, but really it’s the entire cyberpunk literary subgenre of the 1980’s and 90’s, including the Cyberpunk TTRPG.
Marx, Kant, all of Leibniz’ writings. Leibniz needs to be honored more for how ahead of his time he was. Computing algorythms in the 17th century. Mathematics on universe? The last Polymath…
Leibniz was for sure a bonafide genius, but my god was he a weird, foppish little Christian dandy
Oooh yess and i love him! He is litterly like me (i read his letters and letters about him)
Marx is probably the single most important writer in all of history, and it’s honestly unlikely that he will ever be supplanted. The dude gave us the science for understanding how human societies function and how to resolve structural problems. What could be more important than that?
The first code of laws of civilization?
Except that historical materialism shows that civilizations and laws change based modes and relationships of production. So sure, the first set of laws were important, but Marxism allows us to analyze and optimally shape those laws. To me, that is a more important development.
No, yeah, you’re right. I see your point and you’re right :)
Surprised the Crying Indian American TV ad isn’t in here. I have a giggle when I see someone on here outraged that they saw someone toss trash out their car window. That was SOP until the Crying Indian. I can’t think of a PSA in my lifetime that made such a dramatic impact.
While not a piece of media exactly, reporting on the Tylenol Murders changed packaging almost overnight. Used to be you could pull anything off the shelf, open it and close it, no one would be the wiser. I remember as a kid suddenly encountering all the things suddenly having tamper-proof packaging. It was truly wild to my young brain.
Crying Indian is such an interesting nugget of history. Paid for by the plastics lobby who saw the writing on the wall of getting regulated for excessive trash. This same plastics lobby also coined the term “litter bug” and tried to get the world to forget that bottled drinks were sold in reusable bottles that would be deposited, washed, refilled and resealed. But also like you said, the standard procedure was to just toss your trash outside and not worry about it before this campaign, in part because nearly all packaging was biodegradable if not completely reusable until about a generation before this ad campaign (the Ford model T literally came with instructions to reuse the crate it shipped in to make the truck bed for example)
Hadn’t thought of that bit! Yeah, plastics and styrofoam probably surged in packaging when I was a kid. Going to the store with mom was certainly a different experience. We even returned bottles for change.
In the era of the model t, everything was hard to make and thus expensive. I can very much imagine that that crate it came in wasn’t cheap, so reuse only makes sense.
In today’s age everything is so dirt cheap that packaging is just automatic pretty garbage. I’m still waiting for laws to prohibit double, triple, or even quadruple packaging at least. That tube of tooth paste really doesn’t need a carton box around it, and the tube itself could be aluminum again so that the entire damned thing can be recycled, but yeah, plastics are cheaper so here we are.
Didn’t realize how bad plastic truly was until working at Lowe’s for a bit. My god, every product layered in no less than 2 and often 5 or 6 layers of plastic. Even working the outdoor area, where you wouldn’t expect too much, I was tossing out a dumpster a day.
You put it way better than I did about packaging before plastics! There’s so many fascinating examples of things being reused back in the day because of the cost that would never happen today, and will need to start happening again if we want to avoid a societal level catastrophie
Fun fact: the guy who portrayed the native guy in those ads, Iron Eyes Cody, was Sicilian.
Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species.
both good and bad, that one. Lots of good for understanding life on earth (us included), lots of bad for how humans started treating skin color.
Origin of species wasn’t published until 1859…
A good couple hundred years after the Atlantic slave trade started. People were already using skin color as a basis for atrocities. The first formal racial classification of people was done in 1684.
The bible and the quran and what for obvious reasons
Some of the all-time most influential include:
- Capital - Karl Marx
The masterwork of Karl Marx, and one of the most widely cited economic books in history. Capital was a direct influence on much of the developments of the 20th and 21st centuries.
- Manifesto of the Communist Party - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
While not as theoretically deep and important as Capital, the manifesto isn’t more broadly known for no reason. As a work of agitation and propaganda, the manifesto was a major force for spreading communist ideas.
- What is to be Done? - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov “Lenin”
This is the work that cemented Lenin as a critical organizer in the Russian labor movement, amidst all of the many socialist thinkers at the time. Lenin gave an analysis of the various movements at the time, such as Economism, and put forth the necessity of an All-Russian newspaper to connect the working masses from local struggles to the entire struggle.
- Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov “Lenin”
This is perhaps Lenin’s most relevant work today, and has guided how communists view the evolution of capitalism since the time of Marx and Engels. Lenin didn’t merely say “imperialism bad,” he analyzed a concrete material process that capitalism necessarily evolves into, a stage in capitalism that has lasted to today.
- The State and Revolution - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov “Lenin”
Also critically important from Lenin, where he took a firm stance against the social democratic line of reformism and instead restored Marxism’s revolutionary aspect. Using the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin analyzed the class character of states, and elaborated on the economic basis of the withering of the state.
- Marxism and the National Question - Iosif Dzhugashvili “Stalin”
This is the work that put Stalin on the map in the Marxist movement, period. As an ethnic Georgian, Stalin was a national minority in the Russian Empire. This work was so influential that it shifted Lenin’s opinion on the national question, and caused Trotsky to suspect that Stalin never wrote it to begin with because of how high quality it was, with Stalin not writing much in the way of new theory since.
This is where Mao made the case for a peasant revolution in China. Prior to Mao, many communists lacked a belief in the peasantry as a primary engine of revolution, merely believing the peasantry could be supportive of the proletariat but not the primary engine.
Whether you agree with these works or not, what cannot be denied is the sheer influence of these works, and the cascading impact they have had on the struggles of today. They shaped the 20th century and are still shaping the 21st.
What can I say, I’m a commie 👻
True, but it’s really hard to find a more influential writer of the modern era than Marx. Each of those books had a significant influence on the past hundred years. Even if I do wish Proudhon and Kropotkin had been more influential
Ronnie James Dio and his devil horns hand gesture. It became a symbol for rock and metal music, but people often use it as well for other meanings too.
