When tech terrifies
5G is the latest in a long line of tech scare stories. In the 2000s, the panic was over ‘killer Wi-Fi’; in the 90s, mobile phones; in the 1980s, electric power lines. Before that we were scared about radiation from TVs, and in the early days of the steam train, people believed that if humans travelled faster than 30mph their faces would fall off.
Sometimes scares contain a grain of truth, so for example the ‘don’t sit too close to the TV, you’ll ruin your eyes’ concern stemmed from a problem with General Electric TVs in 1967. A manufacturing error meant that some TVs were blasting out X-rays at a rate of up to 100,000 times the safe limit. But most such scares come from simple misunderstandings, such as the belief that any form of radiation is going to melt our brains – a belief that powered the panic over phones and Wi-Fi. Radiation is just energy radiating from something, such as the light from your laptop screen or the radio waves from a radio station.